Climate Change Education as an Emerging Field

• In Event: 18.048 - Education for What? Shaping the Field of Climate Change Education With Children and Young People as Co-Researchers

Abstract

In consideration of the naming and framing fragmentations of environmental education and its iterations (including education for sustainable development and education for sustainability), the children and young people’s research cuts through the semantics to speak more widely than the partiality of ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’. In fact, none our co-researchers mentioned the word sustainability in the workshops, interviews, website, poems or other creative works generated over the course of the project. To us, this indicates that the concept of sustainability bears little to no traction with children and young people who recognise climate change as a catastrophic social and environmental event. The latter point is echoed by Jickling (1991, pp. 154-155) who argued that students should participate ‘as intelligent individuals in the constant re-examination and re-casting of society’, and critically evaluate the terms and conditions of their own educations. However, we revise Jickling’s emphasis on the discerning intelligence of the individual to account for the ways that agency, voice and participation are located within political ecologies which always exceed the human (Bennett, 2012). This eco-ontological shift is born out in the findings of our co-researchers above, in which they reveal their capacity to conduct research outside of the cognitive, human-centred schematics induced by traditional schooling. Thus, (re)consider the implications for such participatory research in positioning climate change education as an emerging field in relation to environmental education and education for sustainability.

Authors

• Amy N. Cutter-Mackenzie, Southern Cross University

• David Rousell, Southern Cross University

• Robert Barratt, University of Gloucestershire