Research Committee

Dr. Linnea Beckett is an anthropologist of education with expertise in decolonial feminisms, informal learning and community-engaged methodologies. Her research resides at the nexus of environmental justice and learning. She is currently the principal investigator (PI) on a Spencer Foundation funded community-engaged participatory research project designed to study intergenerational informal STEM learning in a Mexican immigrant-led community garden located at a public elementary school in a semi-rural agricultural area in California. Beckett is also the Co-PI on an Belmont NORFACE National Science Foundation-funded Transformation to Sustainability international collaboration studying promising grass-roots initiatives of people organizing around groundwater in places where pressures on the resource are particularly acute. Dr. Beckett currently serves as the director of a community engaged research and learning program at UC Santa Cruz, where she works with undergraduates on these research projects and designs and facilitates community learning opportunities for undergraduates with environmental, food, and economic justice community organizations.

Dr. Sally Neas is a Youth Development Advisor for the UC Cooperative Extension, where she does applied research on youth development and environmental education. Her work focuses on partnering with youth to build culturally relevant, personally meaningful and empowering climate education and action. She earned a PhD from the UC Davis, where her doctoral focused on oral histories with young climate activists, documenting and analyzing their stories of moving from despair to empowerment through education. For her MA in community development, she built and piloted the project ClimateSpeak, a project-based learning curriculum that uses storytelling and science learning to help youth relate to and make sense of climate change. Prior to graduate school, she worked for a decade in various youth development and environmental education settings.

Tendai is originally from the eastern highlands region of Zimbabwe where the plateau meets the Vumba Mountains and Chimanimani National Park. After moving to the United States, Dr. Chitewere studied at the State University of New York at Oneonta and majored in water resources with a minor in anthropology. She completed her MA in agricultural engineering at Cornell University and later a doctorate in Environmental Anthropology from Binghamton University (State University of New York). A professor of geography, Dr. Chitewere teaches courses on future environments and environmental impact analysis. Her research applies ethnography to study various forms of sustainable communities focused at the intersection of environmentalism, community and justice. As a political ecologist, she explores the relationship between structures of power and the natural environment. Her current projects include an examination of why pre- and in-service teachers leave STEM teaching careers in the US and Germany, and innovative ways to support K–12 students in STEM careers. She is also the current director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at San Francisco State, where she supports future STEM teachers and efforts to integrate environmental justice in education.