Slowing our Laments: Encouraging Teacher Socioecological Literacies amidst Climate Crisis

• In Event: Reading and Writing about Climate Change: Developing Teachers’ Literacies in/for a Warming World

Abstract

Supporting teachers is a necessity in ensuring all children have access to meaningful climate education (Author et al., 2025). Teachers themselves live through climate impacts, navigating the chaos alongside students and communities. In Fall 2025, as we built a network of Florida teachers growing our socioecological literacies, the Gulf Coast was hit by three major hurricanes, causing devastation across the Southeastern US. Here we consider: what might our composing and teaching practices amidst climate crisis teach us about socioecological literacies?

We investigate socioecological literacies by drawing upon theoretical frameworks in ecojustice education, built from Indigenous, decolonizing, and feminist perspectives, that argue for interrogating assumptions around educational purpose (Martusewicz, 2014; Perkins, 2024). Particularly we question epistemic violence that has come from standardized/functional literacy priorities. Instead we prioritize the plurality of ways of being (literacies) across local and global scales (Perry, 2023). We frame our work through critical place-based inquiry (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) where knowledge and being are positioned as embodied-storied practices of place.

This presentation is drawn from a state-wide teacher network of 12 educators blending research methodologies including socially just participatory inquiry (Author 2018) and mediated discourse analysis (Wohlwend, 2020). Data includes interviews; monthly virtual meetings; in-person workshops; 100+ participant artifacts, (place-based, multimodal, reflective compositions; member-checking; informal communications). We used key moment analysis (Kuby, 2013) to examine affective patterns in the data and mediated discourse analysis for closer analysis of the aftermath of the hurricanes to consider how teachers’ collective sensemaking (interaction order), place and composing intersections (discourses in place), and histories of participation (historical bodies) speak to socioecological literacies practices they mobilized.

Our analysis identified several findings. Teachers experienced, wrote about, and taught through active grief. Their conversations and compositions foregrounded practices of mourning for people, places, ecosystems, and ways of being in place. Teachers wrote eulogies and poetry which lamented not just loss of a specific place (such as a school, home, tree), but also the chaos and longterm damage schools and communities experienced collectively. This intersected with a plea for slowness. The pace of school transitions into and out of emergency was positioned as incompatible with effective support for their students or themselves. They described refusal to move into emergency conditions and rapid demand to return to scripted and curricular benchmarks as disconnected from the ongoing nature of disaster (it is not a one-day event) as well as the shared sensemaking necessary for the children in their classrooms - and for themselves. They positioned the creative composing we prompted in our group as integral to their own ability to navigate the classroom environment in days/weeks following the storms. They also created storytelling spaces in their own classrooms to mimic our network practices.

The significance of these findings points to the need for creating space and time for lamentation as part of socioecological literacies amidst climate impacts. Further, findings signify the dissonance between school-based timescales and those of crisis events, positioning teachers as essential to creating opportunities for practices of place that address lived climate crisis.

Authors

• Alexandra Panos, University of South Florida

• Kristin Valle Geren, University of South Florida

• Jarod Roselló, University of South Florida

• Mieke Valk, Polk County Schools