Infrastructure Literacy: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding How Construction Career Students Think About Environmental Justice

Construction career and technical education (CTE) programmes prepare workers who build the physical infrastructure shaping community health outcomes, yet these programmes do not address how infrastructure decisions create or remediate health disparities in Disadvantaged Communities. A three-layer content analysis of dominant construction curricula across three national systems (United States, Australia, United Kingdom), comprising binary keyword coding, near-synonym expansion, and a thematic audit of 431 learning outcomes, confirms this equity-silence: zero per cent of audited outcomes address environmental justice, community health equity, or the distributional consequences of infrastructure decisions. Existing constructs—environmental literacy, critical consciousness, health literacy, civic engagement, and technological literacy—each capture important dimensions but none integrates built environment specificity, health equity orientation, professional situatedness, and action orientation into a single framework. Following Jabareen's (2009) conceptual framework methodology, this paper proposes infrastructure literacy comprising three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: problem recognition, design integration, and advocacy activation. The paper presents a measurement specification matrix, empirical signatures, and draft assessment items. Grounded in United States construction career education but drawing on internationally documented patterns of environmental injustice, the framework offers a foundation for cross-national vocational education and training (VET) inquiry. A registered randomised controlled trial (NCT07315919; Institutional Review Board (IRB) #84369) with a pre-registered protocol under peer review (bmjopen-2025-115716) is underway.