Horrifying or Hopeful? Challenging Dystopia as Despair in Environmental Education

• In Event: 75.031 - Environmental Education in a Sustainable World

Abstract

This paper reports on student work with dystopian fiction during a 10-week unit on Environmental Education (EE) in a high school English class in Southern Ontario. Dystopian fiction has the potential to provide space for students to engage with feelings of uncertainty related to possible consequences of environmental crisis. Students responded enthusiastically to the genre, engaging in multifaceted and complex ways with environmental themes. The texts heightened their awareness of ‘blank spots’ in their knowledge. While they demonstrate some tolerance for dealing with uncertainty surrounding the blank spots, they also distance themselves at the same time from the larger implications of their own implicitness in systems of oppression alluded to in the texts.

Author

• Velta Douglas, University of Toronto