Negotiating Climate Identities Through Storytelling: Digital Narratives of Middle School Youth

• In Event: Equity and Agency in Climate Change Education

Abstract

Everyday experiences of non-dominant communities are not prevalent in societal discourse around climate change impacts and solutions, limiting the possibility for equitable participation in climate science and climate action. This work explores how youth situated themselves and their communities in the social, cultural and environmental changes associated with anthropogenic climate change through narrative film creation that connected scientific understandings and practice to cultural and personal experiences.
The Green Ninja Film Academy, GENIE, is a six-week multi-disciplinary middle school curriculum at the intersection of science, art and English Language Arts. Here, we analyze a case study of one group of five students from Manzanita Middle School who participated as part of the second pilot of the GENIE curriculum, conducted at seven sites and including over five hundred students. Manzanita is a K-8 inclusive school with a Spanish-Language Immersion Program, and a majority Hispanic student population from low-income families. Data sources include video recorded observations of class meetings of Ms C’s sixth grade classroom in Spring 2017, interviews, qualitative field notes, and curricular artifacts including student films and storyboards. Analysis used a grounded theory methodology.
We interrogated how students developed identities in relation to multiple communities and multiple time periods as they created and enacted their narratives and films. We drew on constructs of identity as negotiated between communities, which may be in dissonance (e.g. Nasir, Rosebery, Warren & Lee 2006; Tan & Calabrese Barton 2008). We conceptualized film creation as an identity construction and considered how learners position themselves as historical actors (Gutiérrez 2008) and/or change agents in eco-social processes across timescales.
We found that youth used character and storyline in their filmmaking to play with their own personal characteristics and possible trajectories. For example, Lena, an aspiring mechanical engineer who talked about having anger issues and not being “charismatic,” told a story centered on a “good” twin who likes the environment, and a “bad” twin who only likes robots and is rude to people; in her story the twins had to work together to help the environment, a narrative which mirrored how Lena spoke about her own struggles in school. Naomi drew on her aunt’s experience with cancer, telling the story of a woman who became more environmentally friendly during recovery from an illness, and became able to travel into the past as she grew stronger. We found that many films, like Naomi’s, incorporated time travel, and that youth reflected on who was able to manipulate time in relation to possible societal and personal futures.
One challenge cited in climate change education is promoting urgency and increasing the relevancy of this global, long time-scale problem. Our findings demonstrated that a holistic, multidisciplinary approach allowed learners to actively situate themselves in climate roles and pathways as they authored identities in relation to personal and societal changes across time and space in ways that supported hope, agency and engagement.

Authors

• Elizabeth Walsh, San José State University

• Elizabeth Stoner, San Jose State University