“Will We Ever Run Out of Water?”: Analyzing Children's Art–iculations of the Climate Catastrophe

• In Event: United We Stand: Interdisciplinarity and Progressive Politics in Pre-K–12 Classrooms, Communities, and Curriculum

Abstract

Purpose
Conversations with children about the climate catastrophe are often limited to science lessons (Davis & Schaeffer, 2019), despite that it is the “most consequential topic of our time” (Damico & Baildon, 2022, p. xii). Particularly since children are the ones who have to “deal with the effects of climate change for the longest time” (Datta, 2023, p. 305), there is no greater time than now to foster relations with our local ecosystems, and no better place to advance climate justice matters as an interdisciplinary issue than in childhood.

We highlight how 150 children aged 7–12 engaged in a year–long, multi–sited study. Using an interdisciplinary approach that explicitly connected the climate crisis to the real world we all live in, we looked across visuals and artist statements children produced. In doing so, we emphasize children's civic and rhetorical practices as they called attention to their experiences with living and nonliving entities in three coastal communities.

Framing
Understanding critical literacies as “aris[ing] from the social and political conditions that unfold in communities in which we live” (Vasquez, 2004, p. 1)–we sought to understand how children visually expressed their sense–making of their local ecosystem and forwarded crucial social messages to broad audiences (Inwood, 2013). Critical literacies helped us nuance how children fostered a critical awareness of inequities and their impact on “life below water and on land” (Williams & Gray, 2023, p. 329).

Methods
We developed and delivered a series of four kits that operated at the intersection of literacy, science, and the arts to the children. Through hands–on inquiry activities aligned to each meteorological season, children critically contemplated and creatively shared their interactions with/in the ecosystem.

Kits included a print–based text where children captured their thinking, reflections, and observations alongside a picturebook related to the season. Using art materials included in each kit, children crafted compositions aligned to the picturebooks.

Analysis & Findings
We analyzed children's visuals and artist statements iteratively by first reviewing their visuals' materials and message content. Then, we read their artists' statements to gain additional insights. Guided by critical literacies, we returned to the children's crafts to examine their civic and rhetorical strategies to document environmental interactions.

Children from all three communities made visible ecosystem happenings as situated in and impacted by sociohistorical systems of power. Tracing how children cultivated relations with their environment and coastal peers through visuals and words, we learned how their civic identities and location influenced the political nature of their responses. Moreover, we understood children's strategic use of rhetoric to counter the commonplace notion that elementary and middle–grade children are “too young” to entertain scientific identities (Ward et al., 2023).

Significance
We join others who have used literacy and arts perspectives to consider how young people address climate precarity (Beach & Smith, 2023; Damico et al., 2020) and (re)center nature–culture relations to disrupt settler colonialism (Bang, 2020). Our interdisciplinary study showcases new possibilities when children are positioned as capable social analysts and knowledge creators with valid experiences to share.

Authors

• Cassie J. Brownell, University of Toronto

• Kathleen Schenkel, San Diego State University

• Jon M. Wargo, University of Michigan