Child and Youth-Led Climate Change Education With Country

• In Event: Climate Country: Dismantling and Co-Constructing Climate Change Education on/With Country

Abstract

Contemporary children and young people are the first to have lived their entire lives under the known existential threat of global climate change (UNICEF., 2021). Climate change has become the defining political issue of young people’s lives such that there is an urgent need to comprehensively conceptualise and advance climate change education in curriculum and pedagogical terms. To date and although limited, formal climate change curriculum and pedagogical responses have predominantly focussed on imparting Western science rather than grappling with cultural understandings of climate change. The systemic and critical failure of this is that climate change education cannot be adequately understood within Western narratives of science (Ritchie & Phillips, 2023).

Through a child-framed participatory methodology, this paper is not a rejection of scientific practices and knowledge, but rather an acknowledgement that matters of scientific fact are entangled with matters of ethical care, culture and political concern. Co-researching with Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and youth has the capacity to support young people as para-academic practitioners, capable of producing research steeped in their cultures and the decolonial (Bunda et al., 2019; Leddy & Miller, 2020; Phillips & Bunda, 2018; Snepvangers, 2016). Central to this paper is indeed the positioning of young people as researchers who are intimately attuned to planetary changes and critical issues of social, cultural and environmental justice (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2023). This paper presents early mappings of young people’s complex climate change education understandings, through building and mobilising historical and transcultural knowledge practices of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and youth.

Authors

• Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Southern Cross University

• Tracey A Bunda, Flinders University

• Louise Gwenneth Phillips, Southern Cross University

• Lexi Lasczik, Southern Cross University

• David Rousell, RMIT University

• Rita L. Irwin, University of British Columbia

• Shannon Leddy, University of British Columbia

• Kim Snepvangers, Southern Cross University