Climate Literacy in Education

Picturebook dialogues about environmental and social (in)justice

Nina Goga — 2023-11-30

Climate aware curriculums and reading practices are urgently needed both in school and higher education. As part of a mobility project focusing on enhancing the quality of teacher education by strengthening student teachers’ and staff’s ecocritical thinking and collaboration competency, the students developed experience-based teaching plans for primary education on how to connect literature activities with reflections on and dialogues about environmental and social (in)justice. This curriculum article presents five of these teaching plans in the format of infographics and explains the educational context and relevance of them.

9th Grade Language & Literature 8 Lesson Unit

Abby Hartzell — 2024-01-10

This 8 lesson 9th grade Language & Literature unit centers on Critical Literacy and Climate Action by exposing students to climate-related texts from diverse genres that foster critical literacy skills and build students’ baseline understanding of the climate crisis and its solutions. The unit covers several Common Core standards related to media literacy, research, and inquiry-based writing. The unit culminates in a student-choice driven climate action research project through which students demonstrate their ability to apply climate literacy concepts to a specific climate solution.

“It Was Beautiful Here, and Then the Pollution Came”:

Neela Nandyal — 2023-12-29

In this reflection I share findings from researching youth climate hope and future outlooks in a fishing community in coastal Ecuador. I discuss how teens in this community experience both climate despair and climate hope and look to nearby nature to inform their thoughts on climate change.

Building a Database and Website for Eco-fiction Resources

Mary Woodbury — 2023-10-12

This essay provides contemporary explanations of the eco-fiction genre and how Dragonfly.eco—a collaborative project exploring such fiction—has evolved over the last ten years. The site's curator, Mary Woodbury, offers a tour guide of the content: reviews, author interviews, music, games, films, and a database of more than 1,000 books. The article also focuses on how children's fiction and climate literacy fits into Dragonfly and provides a site road map for finding teacher's resources. Woodbury acknowledges her interview with Mohammed Ahmed, founding director of Western Sydney Sweatshop literacy movement and editor of After Australia, as well as Edan Lepucki's short story, "There's No Place Like Home" (part of Amazon Original Stories' Warmer collection), as significant sources of inspiration for literacy, including children's climate literacy.

The CLICK Framework

Marek Oziewicz — 2023-05-21

This article outlines the Climate Literacy Capabilities and Knowledges (or CLICK) framework for climate literacy pedagogy. The framework includes four domains—Earth Care, Kinship Care, People Care, and Systems Care—and is modeled on the care-centric thinking central to the Indigenous Worldview and to other Earth stewardship efforts emerging today. The purpose of this article is to introduce CLICK as a conceptual tool to guide classroom practice.

Youth Production of Digital Media to Address the Climate Crisis

Richard Beach — 2023-06-16

This article summarizes youth use of media to address climate change in our forthcoming book, Youth Media Creation on the Climate Crisis: Hear Our Voices (Beach & Smith, in press). The book includes chapters on youth producing videos, digital images/art, social media, digital stories, and online writing media production. Here, we describe examples of the authors’ own media projects from selected chapters, as well as related research on producing these different types of media. You can access chapter summaries and related links, activities, and readings on the use of media for communicating about climate change on the book’s website.

Staying with the Climate Trouble

Lee Zimmerman — 2023-10-12

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.”

Sven Nordqvist’s Pettson and Findus Series and Children’s Education

Marcus Axelsson — 2024-01-08

This article explores how Sven Nordqvist’s books about Pettson and Findus may be used to initiate dialogues in preschool on the relationship between humans and nature. We argue that Nordqvist’s books are especially fitting for ecocritical dialogues on three levels, on which they depart from today's ecocentric aspirations. These levels include (1) the main characters’ view of nature as a resource, (2) the untraditional representation of plants, and (3) the characters’ assumptions of control and superiority over nature, especially over (other) animals. Another implication of the article is that pre-ecocriticism children’s books, and books that are not climate fiction can be useful in preschool discussions thematizing the relationship between humans and nature.

Humanity’s Reliance on the More-Than-Human in Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City

Julia Coltman — 2023-06-16

Various aspects of human life—including art, media, and culture—are becoming increasingly informed by the climate and environmental crises. Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City illustrate and respond to this emergency, rising questions about the consequences of humanity's disconnect from the nonhuman world. Tan’s message is wistful but not hopeless: although reestablishing balance with nature will not be easy, it is the only goal that matters.

A Stone's Throw and Ten Paces

Emma Ambrosi — 2023-06-15

A Stone’s Throw was created as a class project for an undergraduate first-year writing class and is partially based on my own experiences growing up close to a wooded trail in northern Minnesota. My initial intention for the story was to write and illustrate a simple narrative about the mental health benefits of nature exposure, based on both my personal experiences and the findings of several previously published research articles. The basic goal of the story is to introduce the reader to the concept of interacting with nature as a restorative experience, and portray experiencing nature as an accessible activity that requires no prior knowledge or particular skill set.

Ideas for reflection:

Nature can be present around you in many ways, from a state park to a garden to a simple potted plant. What types of nature do you notice around your neighborhood? What types of nature might your students notice?
In the narrative, nature journaling is portrayed as one form of interaction with nature. What other forms of interaction could you engage with and/or teach to your students?

Introduction

Nick Kleese — 2024-01-10

In this Introduction, we review the key developments of 2023 when it comes to climate, including COP28. We reflect on what they mean for CLE and consider their implications for the urgent challenge of building a climate literate, ecological civilization.

Complete Issue

2024-01-16

Galley of the complete issue.