From Silence to Story: Mapping Climate Justice and Relational Literacies in Early Childhood

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Sunday 7:45 am
  In Poster Session: Childhoods, Materials, and Critical Learning Encounters

Abstract

This qualitative multi-case study examines how three early childhood educators use storytelling and picturebooks to engage young children in justice-oriented climate literacies through a focus on water. Drawing on narrative cartography and a climate storytelling framework, we trace how teachers’ pedagogical stories navigate ecological identity, intergenerational kinship, systems thinking, and environmental grief. Findings reveal that climate storytelling in early childhood unfolds as partial, embodied, and relational acts, disrupting dominant developmental approaches and enabling children to act with agency in their local community and water contexts. These story-rich practices, grounded in place and relationalities, position early childhood classes as sites for collective ecological imagination, responsibility, and repair. We highlight implications for anti-colonial, community-rooted climate pedagogies in early learning.

Authors

• Jessica Ramos, University of Colorado - Denver

• Lauren Fletcher, California State University - Stanislaus

• Erica Holyoke, University of Colorado - Denver