Climate Literacy in Education

Introduction to the Special Issue:

Stephanie Rollag Yoon — 2024-11-12

Zines and Water:

Tiffany Hagey — 2024-11-12

This water stimulus packet was developed to model College Board’s Advanced Placement Seminar Performance Task Two stimulus packet. The intention to offer students opportunities to practice skills and strategies needed to work through a text set and successfully then conduct further water-issue research. In particular, this text set aimed to give junior students a varied base of knowledge about water issues, both locally and globally, while identifying thematic connections and using it to launch their own research. This specific lesson centered around AP Seminar students individually reading a book chapter and organizing their key takeaways and summarized text in the form of a pocket zine.

City of Pure Water:

Katharine Werthwine — 2024-11-12

This 9th and 10th grade multimodal writing unit takes a place-based approach to argumentative writing. Over ten lessons, students explore a local environmental issue through teacher-curated text sets before working with a partner to create a visual essay arguing for a community-based solution. The unit was originally designed and implemented in an Intensive Reading/English Language Arts combination classroom and aims to support and scaffold diverse learners. The unit is aligned to both 9^th-10^th Grade Common Core and Florida BEST standards on argumentation and organization. The goal of the unit is to foster students’ abilities to write and develop specific claims in their arguments.

Drawing Our Water Stories

Melanie Ariens — 2024-11-12

As living beings, we are united by our universal dependence on water. We cannot live without it. Whether it is an innate connection or a deep-seated fear, we all have a water story to share. Drawing our water stories can generate empathy with one another and the non-human world.

Water Aways Means Something:

Jay Bullock — 2024-11-12

I present the outline of and possibilities for a high school English unit examining writers’ symbolic use of water. Water typically symbolizes life, change, or cleansing. I suggest multiple possible texts in varying genres, as well as climate connections, for each of those meanings. I offer a student assessment prompt, “What water means to me,” which students can write to at the beginning of the unit and revisit at the end. I provide a link to a Google folder with references, more resources, customizable activities, and a Spotify playlist.

Water Protection:

Kristine M. Schutz — 2024-11-12

This six-week water inquiry unit with pre-service teachers in an English Language Arts (ELA) elementary education methods course explores the guiding question: Why is it important to protect water, and how can water be protected? Core whole-class texts include We are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom (2020) and Thirst by Varsha Bajaj (2022). Multiple assessment projects that support pre-service teachers’ informational reading and writing are included.

Troubling the Waters:

Candance Doerr-Stevens — 2024-11-12

This article provides an overview of “Water as Resource, Relative and Place”: an online collection of eco texts including picturebooks, chapter books, YA novels, and media texts that illustrate a wide range of relationships with water. The article includes a brief history on how the online resource was started and reflects on how we all wear multiple hats in how we relate to water. In better understanding our multifaceted relationship to water, we can better position ourselves in our teaching about, caring for, and flourishing with water.

Life-giver, Death-bringer:

Julianna Kershen — 2024-11-12

Teaching children about water and symbolism through literature can be an excellent way to engage their imagination while developing their analytical skills. Jewell Parker Rhodes’s award-winning middle grade novel, Ninth Ward, offers a rich opportunity for interdisciplinary, ecocritical inquiry within standards-based learning and teaching expectations. This article suggests youth participatory action research as an active learning strategy for engaging youth in community-based investigations of water connected to their study of water's literal and figurative significance in the novel.

Water in Balance with Mind and Body:

Sonja R. Braucht — 2024-11-12

This article offers reflections of a thematic unit centered on water, which was part of an earlier issue of Climate Literacy in Education 1(1) This discussion emphasizes the significance of community involvement, the role of project-based learning in enhancing student engagement, and the integration of social-emotional learning within the broader context of climate literacy.

"We are Water Warriors":

Rebecca Woodard — 2024-11-12

Elementary-aged children with a team of science, theater, and literacy educators performed the Chicago Global Water Dances in 2023. Global Water Dances (GWD) is an international initiative to raise awareness about water issues, promote sustainability, and inspire action to protect water resources through dance performed by a local body of Water. Through the Chicago Global Water Dances, children articulated several messages about the necessity of, and right to, clean water and highlighted the collective responsibility to protect this precious resource.

Looking Upstream:

Rebecca Rogers — 2024-11-12

“Looking upstream” refers to going beyond the negative effects of the current problems which disproportionately impacts historically marginalized families— water contamination, flooding, and scarcity—to see causation: why is the problem happening in the first place? In this article, we “look upstream” at our language and literacy practices and attempt to see how these are entangled with representations of our place in the water cycle. We examine a few curricular artifacts from our Literacy Clinic—dually focused on responsive literacy instruction and water justice—to illustrate our entanglements with linguistic systems, discourses, and narratives. Part of the way forward, we argue, is changing the ways we speak, write, and read in relation to our shared environment, including water and all forms of life.

Visual Stories as Educational Tools:

Wenyan Yang — 2024-11-12

This study explores the efficacy of children's picture books in communicating complex environmental issues to young audiences, focusing on We Are Water Protectors and Autumn Peltier, Water Warrior. These books utilize the approach of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, to explore how pictures engage and educate about water protection. Through a detailed examination of interactions within these books and with readers, this article highlights how visual narratives can effectively evoke emotional responses and foster environmental awareness among young readers. The findings suggest that such visual narratives not only enhance understanding of sustainability challenges but also serve as powerful tools for social change, inspiring activism, and cultural engagement.

Water is Life:

Danielle Haque — 2024-11-12

What does it mean for a classroom of college students in Minnesota to read these words? How can they contemplate the idea that water is life, considering both their Dakota neighbors in Standing Rock and the people of Gaza? This essay is a reflection on how I use water in my Minnesota State University undergraduate humanities courses to teach about climate change as the defining crisis of our moment, and its emergence from environmental racism, colonialism, and inequality.

“We are all in this together”:

Sean P. Connors — 2024-11-12

As carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels warm the planet, altering the climate and causing severe drought in some regions and unprecedented flooding in others, and as state and local governments privatize once-public water systems in the name of fiscal austerity, the connection between water equity and social justice is increasingly evident. This article introduces a critical lens of intersectional environmentalism and identifies three questions that teachers and students can ask to examine how a society’s treatment of water is connected to its treatment of people. When students understand how the well-being of people, animals, natural resources, and the Earth itself are interconnected, they are better prepared to explain how working for environmental justice necessitates their working for social justice as well.

Intergenerational Healing within Waterscapes:

Milena Renee Rodriguez — 2024-11-12

Since time immemorial, humans have had a flowing communication with Water and have been connected to Water in infinite ways through ritual, celebration, storytelling, and contemplative practices (Leonard et al., 2023). We are Water. This essential truth of our interconnected existence has been denied by past and present interrelated systems of violence, such as colonialism, patriarchy, and pollution, which have affected us and our planet (Ansloos, 2023). In this article, I analyze the films Estiu 1993 (2017) and Whale Rider (2003), their girl child protagonists Frida and Pai, and illustrate how young girls find a spiritual connection to themselves, their departed loved ones, and the world through a spiritual connection with the Waterscapes they have access to. I also highlight Indigenous perspectives about intergenerational healing through embodied Water practices and rituals. with the beyond-human world (Rodriguez, 2024). I offer suggestions on approaching the films pedagogically, emphasizing the potential to integrate anti-oppression and eco-justice discussions within multigenerational and culturally safe educational environments.

My Friend, The Lake

Christina Randazzo — 2024-11-12

In My Friend, The Lake, readers are introduced to Lake Erie as a cherished friend of the narrator. In the story, young readers are introduced to the colorful wonders of the world around them and to the importance of caring for the environment. Throughout the book, Lake Erie is gently anthropomorphized, emphasizing to the audience that she is a complex living entity rather than an inanimate body of water.
The story highlights the beauty of Lake Erie while also drawing attention to her role in providing essential resources to those who depend on her, including fresh drinking water, food, and a home for many different species of wildlife. However, Lake Erie also faces challenges, such as toxic algae blooms, which the narrator and the audience confront together in the story. Through the narrator’s journey, readers are invited to reconsider how they engage with the natural world. They are encouraged to become stewards of the environment and are encouraged to take action by being a voice for their local environments.