This article, by Sarah Matysiak, is part of a series highlighting members of the Office of Sustainability’s Experts Database. In a collaboration with instructor Hannah Monroe’s course, LSC 561: Writing Science for the Public, students interviewed campus sustainability experts and produced short feature stories.
Growing up in Quito, Ecuador’s bustling capital city of 1.7 million people, Diego Román didn’t have the same opportunity to connect with nature’s quiet side that many other environmentalists have from a young age. Although he found a way to connect with nature when visiting his uncle’s farm, even those deeply appreciated trips were infrequent. This, however, didn’t stop Román from pursuing a career in environmental protection. If anything, it propelled him down that path and solidified his advocacy for sustainability.
Finding a way to combine his affection for nature with his other values of culture and language, Román researches conversations around environmental protection and inequity for multilingual communities. For Román, a faculty member in Department of Curriculum and Instruction at UW–Madison, sustainability in his research concerns how people incorporate all the communities living in a region to protect the environment: He wants to give them a say and a voice that they are seldom given in environmental initiative discussions. For instance, he recognized that many multilingual communities — especially those in rural Wisconsin, where much of his current research takes place — are excluded from conversations about environmental initiatives that directly impact them and their livelihood. Román hopes he can help fellow educators find ways of teaching multilingual students about environmental topics that impact their daily lives.
This is especially important when it comes to climate change. Often, multilingual and Indigenous communities experience land appropriation or displacement from one region to another due to climate change.
“If you have less money, you are not able to move if flooding, for example, impacts your neighborhood,” Román said. “Usually, migrant communities or communities of color are impacted by these phenomena that are mostly due to environmental injustice.”
To conduct his research and collect data, Romàn interviews people from multilingual communities, makes observations in the field, goes on school visits, and arranges workshops. The workshops are particularly important, as they allow him to evaluate the impact on teachers and students of multilingual backgrounds.
In rural Wisconsin, as well as in the communities he’s worked with in Ecuador, he aims to create “spaces in which everyone is invited” and open discussions of nature, the challenges and inequities that happen around accessing nature, and a range of environmental issues.
“Language — the way we talk about things or the stories we tell — is the most powerful way in which we express our love for nature,” Román said. “And every community, every person, connects with nature in different ways.”
It’s amazing, he emphasized, the many different ways people can experience the same thing.
Román expressed that doing this research makes him feel that “I am contributing something meaningful to our planet, the different communities, and the different peoples that live on our planet.” Interacting with these different communities both in Wisconsin and beyond allows a “window into their worldview of nature and now nature is central to who they are.”
In the end, Román hopes educators and teachers can understand how complex multilingual communities are and maybe even learn for themselves how rich multilingual communities’ knowledge is. Working with different perspectives and becoming open to them, Román said, is one way to decentralize thinking and approach learning experiences “from a place of humbleness.”