Climate Literacy in Education

Staying with the Climate Trouble

On (Not) Containing the Crisis in the Classroom

Lee Zimmerman

Zimmerman

DOI: https://doi.org/10.24926/cle.v1i2.5611

Keywords: climate crisis pedagogy, climate crisis, eco-anxiety, How to Change Everything, Staying With The Trouble, hope, containment

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Abstract

Trying to introduce the climate crisis into the classroom as a crisis presents us with a pedagogical challenge: how to contain the crisis without foreclosing it? Focusing on Naomi Klein’s How to Change Everything, I suggest that attempts to contain eco-anxiety mainly by stressing “what students can do” risk foreclosing the crisis by obscuring its real urgency. Rather than offering what Jenny Offill ironically calls an “obligatory note of hope,” we might consider that our deepest obligation isn’t to alleviating eco-anxiety but to helping students listen to and be guided by it: to help students, as Donna Haraway puts it, “stay with the trouble.”