Climate Literacy in Education

From Science to Stories:

Analyzing and Creating Picturebooks in an English Learner Classroom

Jess Emery

Two Rivers High School

Keywords: climate emotions, Picturebooks, multimodal writing, school partnerships, English Learners, authentic writing tasks

Abstract

English learners (ELs) arrive to the high school classroom with greatly varying experiences of learning about the climate crisis. If they have learned about the climate crisis in school, they have likely learned mostly about it via science. In an attempt to move towards a curriculum that includes ideas about the values, behaviors, and actions related to the climate emergency, I created a unit in my advanced EL Reading and Writing course that uses picturebooks to learn about the climate emergency and engage in a real-world writing task.