Coupling Imagination with Action for Sustainable Energy Transitions: Middle School Students Place-Based Authoring of the Future

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

Abstract

Overview

Low-carbon energy transitions are imperative to addressing ecological and social impacts of climate change and supporting sustainable, just futures (Araújo, 2017). Youth, aware of the precarity of failing to meet this challenge, reflect hopelessness, lack of agency, and dystopian future visions (Angheloiu et al., 2020). In response, scholars call for shifts in sustainability education: from individual to collective orientations, scientific to multiperspectival framing, and transmissive to action-oriented pedagogies that situate youth as agents of change (Trott et al., 2023).
As literacy learning has much to offer in cultivating these shifts, this qualitative case study examines seventh-graders localized speculative fiction authored as part of their year-long action-based effort to build, test, and imagine the future impacts of an agrivoltaics project-combining solar energy generation with school gardening. Students built and monitored six garden beds (three with, three without solar panels), shared findings with a regional K-12 community-science network, and promoted energy equity in their community. Students were invited to create place-based solar futures narratives that speculated on community benefits of their work 20 years in the future. This research addresses the question: How does coupling an action-oriented community-based sustainability project with authoring multimodal speculative fiction offer opportunities that couple the actual with the possible?

Theoretical Perspective

Few educational initiatives engage youth in imagining renewable energy futures grounded in their personal or community values (Jorgenson et al., 2019; Monroe et al., 2019). Nonetheless, emerging research explores how students’ engage with sustainability and climate change through authoring narratives (e.g., Gannon, 2017; Rudd et al,., 2020). The study builds on work positioning futures thinking as a civic and educational practice (Harjo, 2019; Jordan et al., 2023) and imagining multimodal future narratives as an educational imperative (Jordan et al., 2021; Toliver, 2020). We couple those perspectives with action-oriented pedagogies, a framework that couples imagination with action by engaging students in imagining preferred futures, planning for co-produced impact, and taking agentic action that contributes real work to sustainable communities (Weinberg, 2024).

Methods

Participants included seventh-grade students in a STEAM elective focused on sustainable energy and their teacher, who had a language arts specialization. Data sources were 15 student-created multimodal narratives and transcripts from 13 student interviews (180 minutes). Using narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2006), analysis focused on personal/social elements, temporality, and place—especially the integration of actual and imagined futures.

Findings

Three themes offer insights on how students interwove their actual agrivoltaic community-science work with the possible futures they imagined:
Transporting self to the future: youth protagonists engaged in future STEAM contexts that expanded school-community collaboration.
Transforming relationships: narratives depicted youth-adult partnerships marked by shared power and relational agency for sustainable energy transitions.
Engineering the future: youth characters led social and technical innovation (e.g., improving solar technology).

Significance

Findings highlight the power of linking local, action-based work with future-oriented storytelling. Literacy researchers might explore how integrating real-world ecological engagement with imaginative narrative can foster hope and deepen meaningful, place-based learning.

Authors

• Michelle Jordan, Arizona State University

• Steven J. Zuiker, Arizona State University