Understanding immigrant children’s transnational knowledges about global climate change literacies

• In Event: The Potential of English Language Arts Education for Restor(y)ing Hopeful Socioecological Futures

Abstract

Overview

Young children will face around nearly four times as many climate disasters as their grandparents did, including wildfires, storms, floods and droughts (Thiery et al., 2021). Understanding children’s perspectives about climate change is an urgent need considering that children are environmental stakeholders, future voters and potential climate justice advocates facing the pernicious effects of local and global environmental degradation (Woodard & Schutz, 2024). In this presentation, we explore how children in a first and second grade classroom used their transnational knowledges within interactive read-alouds (Wiseman, 2010) and inquiry groups (Goudvis et al., 2019) to make sense of climate change from a global perspective.

Theoretical perspectives

We investigate children’s global climate change literacies by drawing upon the theoretical perspectives of transnational funds of knowledge (Kwon et al., 2019; Cuero, 2010) to explore the nuanced and sometimes deeply personal ways in which immigrant students make sense of climate change events. Transnational funds of knowledge combine the concept of funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) with transnationalism (Skerrett, 2012) to honor and recognize the knowledge and experiences of immigrant students that transcend national boundaries. We also draw upon critical childhood studies (Dumas & Nelson, 2016) to understand these events by deeply listening to children’s ways of making sense of climate change through the material and social constraints of their lives, rather than through adult-driven norms.

Methods

This study was based across two urban-intensive (Milner, 2012) early childhood classrooms in which the majority of students were from immigrant and refugee backgrounds. In this study, we blended research methodologies – ethnography (Blommaert & Jie, 2010), practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2015), and discourse analysis (Bloome et al., 2022). Data includes videos of student’s participation in read-alouds and student-led inquiry groups, students’ written work, interviews and field notes. We used inductive analyses (Thomas, 2021) to examine patterns in the data and then identified rich points (Agar, 2006) for closer analysis within each of these patterns.

Findings

Our analyses show several themes. First, we found that children made personal connections based on family histories and transnational experiences oftentimes in order to understand their geographical and emotional relationship to climate change events (e.g. children’s emotional connection increased depending on their proximity to events either in the U.S. or country of origin). Second, their personal connection to climate change impacted their anxiety and concern about the effects of climate change (e.g. children shared how they have experienced extreme weather globally). Third, we found that children showcased complex understandings of how the effects of climate change affected people across national boundaries and wealth disparities (e.g. children inquired about how countries–who are most affected by climate change–are able to respond to the effects of global warming, even as these countries contribute significantly less to greenhouse gasses that cause climate change).

Significance

The significance of these findings points to the possibilities of eliciting young children’s complex understandings of climate change, a needed perspective considering the increase in the effects of climate change that children experience across the globe.

Authors

• Faythe Beauchemin, Boston College

• Brenda Luo, Boston College

• Li Yong, Boston College

• Geying Zhang, Boston College