Spatial and Temporal Dynamics in Climate Change Education Discourse: An Eco-Linguistic Perspective

• In Event: 32.083 - Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: 32.083-20 - Emerging Approaches in Environmental Education Research

Abstract

What does it mean to know climate change? How do students make local and individual meaning of what is ultimately a global and unequally distributed collective action problem? Our study answers these broad questions by focusing empirical attention on spatial and temporal dynamics in climate change education. We answer the following research question: How do students locate themselves across space and time relative to climate change phenomena in educational contexts?

The only comparative international study of climate change awareness (Lee et al., 2015) found that formal education was the biggest predictor of climate change awareness, with “developed” nations exhibiting greater levels of educational awareness. Citizens of nations with less-developed formal education systems exhibited lower levels of awareness, even though they were more likely to experience the effects of climate change. This suggests a disconnect between those in advanced economies who are disproportionately responsible for the causes of climate change (Norgaard, 2011) and yet are spatially and temporally distanced from the effects of their actions. Climate change is a global phenomenon experienced and represented at local levels (Edwards, 2010). Similarly, the globalization and increased flow of information – including climate change information – is forcing new entanglements between the social and natural worlds (Tsing, 2011). Understanding how such processes work in climate change education requires an examination of how language shapes conceptual learning across both time and space.

We accomplish our analysis by leveraging theories from sociolinguistics (Blommaert, 2010), spatial literacy (Leander & Sheehy, 2004; Scollon, 2013) and ecolinguistics (Stibbe, 2015) to examine how students make sense of the climate change phenomenon. We are interested in how particular phenomena (i.e., causal mechanisms, effects, solutions) manifest in educational contexts. Using critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001) we qualitatively examined 22 interviews (n = 11 students) that were conducted before and after climate change educational experiences in middle school classrooms in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. We used Blommaert’s (2010) concept of indexical ordering and Scollon’s (2013) concept of conceptual mobility to examine regimes of linguistic interaction in climate change education. In other words: how particular concepts moved across scalar space (e.g., local, regional, global) and through time (e.g., past, present, future) in student explanations of phenomena. We also conducted a secondary content analysis to examine which climate change topics were more or less salient. For example, sea level rise is a global phenomenon with local implications that are geographically and temporally different depending on where one lives (Breslyn, McGinnis, McDonald, & Hestness, 2016).

We found that a majority of students dissociated themselves from past climate causality while simultaneously expressing responsibility for individualistic future solutions such as recycling and consuming greener products. They also expressed emotional stress at the distant and overwhelming global nature of climate phenomena, and coped via the scalar downshifting of solutions. We continue to examine these findings and hope to explore them at further conceptual depth in the roundtable conversation.

Authors

• Joseph A. Henderson, University of Delaware

• Asli Sezen-Barrie, University of Maine

• Andrea Drewes, University of Delaware