Community Care

Our motto is “High standards, high support. Tough on ideas and kind to people.” Looking for more information? Hover over the Community Care tab above to find links to these topics. 

 

My work asks what becomes possible when education, research, conservation, interpretation, and community engagement are organized around belonging, relationship, and responsibility.

I use community care to name both an ethic and a set of practices. It means creating conditions in which people can participate meaningfully, encounter ideas that challenge them, receive the support they need, and help shape the communities of which they are part. Care is not the absence of rigor. It is what makes sustained learning, honest inquiry, intellectual risk, accountability, and repair possible.

Community care also extends beyond the human community. We learn and act within living systems: among soils, waters, plants, animals, histories, cultures, and institutions. My current work therefore brings culturally inclusive pedagogy into conversation with a biospheric curriculum—an approach that asks how education might help people understand themselves as members of a diverse, interdependent world and act with greater attention, reciprocity, and care.

What guides this work

  • Belonging without erasure. People should be able to participate fully without being asked to leave important parts of themselves outside the classroom, laboratory, field site, or meeting room.

  • Equity and access by design. Fairness is not always sameness. I aim to anticipate barriers, make expectations visible, offer multiple ways to engage and demonstrate learning, and align support with need.

  • Plural ways of knowing. Western science is powerful, but it is not placeless or complete. Strong environmental learning also makes room for lived experience, natural and cultural history, the humanities, community knowledge, and Indigenous knowledge—without treating distinct traditions as interchangeable or extracting them from the peoples and places to which they belong.

  • Place, history, and power. Environmental questions are inseparable from the histories and relationships that shape land, access, knowledge, and decision-making. Context is not an optional addition to science; it changes what we notice, what we ask, and what responsible action requires.

  • Reciprocity, accountability, and repair. Statements of care matter only when they are connected to practice. This includes listening, sharing power, compensating expertise, responding to feedback, acknowledging harm, and changing course when needed.

Explore the work

Culturally Inclusive Pedagogy

Culturally inclusive pedagogy creates the conditions in which students can belong, contribute, and grow. This page offers six practical commitments for course and learning design: build trust and relationship; design for access and difference; make learning relevant and situated; expand whose knowledge and voice count; structure participation equitably; and cultivate rigor, agency, feedback, and growth.

Toward a Biospheric Curriculum

A biospheric curriculum widens both our sources of knowledge and our community of concern. It locates people within ecological and cultural relationships, joins critical attention to colonialism and hierarchy with attention to the more-than-human world, and asks four organizing questions:

  • What is this work for?

  • Whom—and what—does it serve?

  • What relationships does it sustain or interrupt?

  • What responsibilities follow?

Land Acknowledgments and Action

Land acknowledgments can be openings for learning and relationship, but words alone are not enough. This page considers how acknowledgments can be historically grounded, locally specific, connected to living Indigenous peoples, and accompanied by concrete commitments, compensated consultation, and continuing action.

Environmental Identity, Participation, and Place

People are more likely to enter and remain in environmental fields when they can recognize those fields as places where their identities, communities, questions, and experiences matter. My research and public-facing work explore how environmental identity develops, how institutions shape pathways into environmental learning and careers, and how close attention to place can deepen belonging and responsibility.

Care and Well-Being at Duke

Belonging also depends on whether people can find support when they need it. These pages gather starting points for Duke students and Duke faculty and staff. Because services change, readers should confirm current details with the relevant Duke office.

How community care appears in my work

  • Teaching and mentoring: transparent expectations, accessible course design, active and field-based learning, thoughtful feedback, shared norms, and high support alongside high standards.

  • Research and conservation: questions attentive to environmental identity, participation, power, human–wildlife relationships, and the conditions under which both people and the more-than-human world can flourish.

  • Interpretation and community engagement: learning with places and communities; connecting natural and cultural history; making knowledge public and usable; and treating interpretation as a practice of relationship rather than one-way delivery.

  • Writing and reflection: using scholarship, field notes, story, and observation to notice how ecology, history, memory, and belonging shape one another.

You can see these commitments across my teaching, the work of the Cagle Lab, and my public natural- and cultural-history writing at Sense of Place.

Selected scholarship and practical resources

Inclusive teaching and communication

Environmental identity and pathways

  • Caldwell, L., and N. L. Cagle. 2021. “Characteristics of Nonformal K–12 Pathway Programs Aiming to Enhance Diversity in Environmental Science.” Journal of STEM Education.

  • Miao, E., and N. L. Cagle. 2020. “The Role of Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in Environmental Identity Development in Undergraduate Student Narratives.” Environmental Education Research.

  • Cagle, N. L., L. Hadley, and N. Thompson. 2019. Undergraduate Diversity Pathways Strategic Planning Report. Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University.

  • Cagle, N. L., L. Caldwell, and R. Garcia. 2018. “K–12 Diversity Pathway Programs in the E-STEM Fields: A Review of Existing Programs and Summary of Unmet Needs.” Journal of STEM Education 19(4): 12–18.

  • Cagle, N. L. 2018. K–12 Diversity Pathway Programs Strategic Planning Report. Nicholas School of the Environment, Duke University.

For a fuller record of scholarship, reports, presentations, and public writing, visit Publications & Writings.

An ongoing practice

This work is not a completed checklist or a claim to have arrived. Language changes, institutions change, and my own thinking continues to develop through teaching, reading, fieldwork, collaboration, feedback, and repair. I offer these materials as working resources: grounded in scholarship and experience, open to revision, and oriented toward a simple but demanding purpose—helping people and the living world flourish together.