Supporting Teachers’ Speculative Civic Literacies through Hopeful Climate Fiction (Cli Fi) Writing

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

Abstract

Overview
Reading and writing climate fiction (cli-fi) can increase awareness about environmental issues and propensity to take action (Whiteley, Chiang, & Einsiedel, 2016), support considerations of consequences of natural and social systems, develop systems thinking, and offer opportunities to explore ethical dimensions of climate change (Milkoriet, 2016). The act of writing cli-fi (particularly around shared commitments of hopeful imagining) can be positive for writers, giving them a sense of control and purpose in the face of immense challenges (Cothren, Matthews, & Hennessy, 2023). Research also demonstrates that through writing, teachers can experience a strengthened sense of confidence, voice, and empowerment (Whitney, 2008). The National Writing Project (NWP) site where this research is situated supported sixteen k-16 teachers to spend an academic year in a professional learning community where they learned about climate change, and read and wrote hopeful (Ojala, 2012) cli-fi. We focus this analysis on the following research question: How does reading and writing hopeful climate fiction (cli-fi) support k-12 teachers to imagine, re-story, and innovate existing civic structures?

Theoretical Perspective
Speculative civic literacies privilege “a collaborative push toward democratic interrogation and innovation over integration into existing civic and political structures” (Mirra & Garcia, 2022, p. 345). It encourages “boundary-pushing…[and] creative thinking about how to fully re-story…public life by putting lived and participatory approaches to democratic learning into conversation with agentic resistance and public dreaming of futurist literary world-building” (Mirra & Garcia, 2022, p. 351). This framework supports writing/composing towards transformative purposes, such as solidarity action, and against structures or ideas (Garcia & Mirra, 2021, p. 652).

Methods
Sixteen educators (13 K-12 and 3 higher education) were involved in this yearlong climate fiction initiative, involving seven meetings (2 hours each) where we read and discussed published climate fiction, and wrote our own short stories. Case study methodology was utilized (Yin, 2014), and data collection methods included recorded observations of all meetings along with observational field notes, interviews with core participants, surveys of additional teachers, and artifact collection (e.g., teachers’ writing, PD materials). Guided by the research questions, we systematically analyzed the data through multiple cycles of inductive analysis, including writing fieldnotes, transcribing interviews, writing analytic memos, and engaging in multiple cycles of coding. We sought to meaningfully partner researchers and teachers as knowledge-producers (Blackmore, 1999), including an open invitation to teachers as co-analyzers of data, co-authors, and co-presenters of research findings.

Findings
Preliminary findings suggest that, through hopeful cli fi reading and writing, teachers: (1) interrogated and reimagined existing civic and political structures (e.g., capitalism; consumerism; individualism; human dominance); and (2) engaged in futurist thinking in ways that highlighted collectivity, solidarity, joy, creativity, innovation, and/or agentic resistance.

Significance
This paper engages squarely with the conference theme of futuring for education and education research. As the k-12 teachers in this project imagined hopeful socioecological futures, they simultaneously examined and critiqued the present and past, building capacity for engaging with topics and emotions related to climate change in their own lives and writing, as well as with their students.

Authors

• Rebecca Woodard, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Andrea Vaughan, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Kate Sjostrom, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Kristine Wilber, University of Illinois at Chicago