Using Storytelling and Artistic Approaches to Contextualize Climate Change and Energy Relations With Children and Young People

• In Event: 21.040 - Children's Common Worlds in Times of Climate Change and "Post-Truths"

Abstract

Climate change research with children has long recognised that formulating an opinion on, and a valid response towards, climate change is an issue of social, cultural and economic equity. Amongst younger populations, those experiencing poverty and other forms of disadvantage are most likely to face the severest impacts of climate change. Climate change infiltrates many aspects of children’s everyday lives: access to food; travel to school or work; susceptibility to water-borne diseases and respiratory – to name but a few.

The manifold impacts of climate change require diverse climate change pedagogies. However, climate change curricula have been dominated by particular pedagogies, underpinned by specific scientific knowledges. Nonetheless, increasingly, researchers and educators have sought to decentre and complement these approaches through alternative modes of climate change education that both draw on children’s everyday experiences and witness the more-than-human forces that constitute environmental learning.

In this poster, we argue that the use of storytelling and linked creative research/learning activities can create new ways of articulating children’s multiple relationships with climate change. Given its centrality to climate change, we focus upon ‘energy’. However, we understand ‘energy’ in the broadest possible terms, both incorporating (rather than effacing) scientific knowledges, as well as extending the term to bodily energies and movements, energy histories, and the energies of nonhuman agents.

The activities took place in two services provided by the St Pauls Community Development Trust in the city of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom: a nursery school providing childcare and early years education for a socio-economically disadvantaged South Asian community; and, an independent school for teenage boys with complex social, emotional and behavioural needs, who have been excluded from mainstream schools.

The poster brings together a series of case studies of collaborative action research/learning, including: collaborative storytelling to develop narratives that contextualise the science behind climate change; harnessing the power of various energy sources such as magnets to create pieces of art; engaging with technological innovations (e.g. Makey Makey wires) to understand how energy can be generated by human and other bodies.

Significantly, and building from recent critiques of some forms of new materialist theorization in education and childhood studies, we explore how children’s engagements with energy are entangled with/in two ‘contextual’ processes. Firstly, Birmingham’s longer-term significance in terms of energy ‘histories’ – as both a major post-industrial city, and a locus for global migration. Secondly, how class, ethnicity and socio-emotional difference intersect with childhoods and multiple (more-than-human) forces to produce what childhood scholars have recently termed ‘extrasectional’ understandings of energy processes.

We observe how collaborative research/learning activities can help children foreground new and nuanced relationships with energy. These approaches break the assumption of the existence of a homogeneous, anthropocentric relationship with energy that is measurable through solely scientific means. This cross-pollination of ideas has the ability to foreground pedagogical innovations through which climate change curriculum design can be positively developed.

Authors

• Peter Kraftl, Birmingham University

• Arooj Khan