Youth Visions of Climate Literacy: Mobilizing a Movement to “Turn it Around!”

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Global Education during the climate crisis: opportunities and solutions from research, practice, and transnational collaboration

Proposal

Debates about the climate crisis often happen without those who will confront and bear its worst impacts in the future - children and youth. This presentation foregrounds youth voices and visions of climate futures, focusing on how children and youth understand, define, and envision mainstreaming climate literacy in formal and non-formal education contexts. It starts with the premise that education is directly implicated in the climate crisis. Despite efforts to promote education as key to achieving sustainable lives, education systems continue to perpetuate the logic of human exceptionalism and emphasize education’s role in prioritizing economic growth over other areas of impact such as environmental sustainability. Introducing climate education into existing systems will ultimately fall short of making the critical shifts in mindset, practice, and action necessary for the planet and people to survive. Refusing the elusive promise of incremental change, youth leaders globally envision a more radical cultural transformation to curb the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

This presentation aims to bring into focus - and into policy dialogue - powerful perspectives by young artists and leaders who participated in the “Turn it Around!” initiative - a global youth-led initiative, spanning five continents and over fifty countries. Mobilizing the power of socially engaged art, the initiative crowdsourced artwork and text responses from children and youth globally, inviting them to imagine ideal learning environments, share their everyday actions that contribute to a livable future h, tell why climate education is critical for their learning, or share their perspectives on climate literacy. In 2021/2022, submissions were received in three languages (English, French, and Spanish), adding Portuguese, Arabic, and Mandarin languages in 2022/2023. Visual and textual data was analyzed by an international and interdisciplinary group of students and scholars, seeking to highlight common themes and divergent perspectives in reimagining current education policies and practices.

Setting in motion a series of ‘turns’ - decolonial, intergenerational, methodological, and pedagogical - the analysis makes clear that including climate education in the existing school curriculum is merely not enough, from a youth perspective. Children and youth globally are calling for a more radical transformation of the education system and school curriculum, which entails “unlearning and undoing harmful patterns that have been woven into our mindsets and our ways of life.” Moving beyond the traditional approaches to literacy and numeracy as measured by student achievement scores, children and youth redefine literacy in much broader terms, calling for ecological literacy. Ecological literacy is driven not only by the acquisition of empirical knowledge or the search for technoscientific solutions, but first and foremost requires learning a more demanding capability to attune to and learn with the living world. Such literacy enables humans not only to understand how the world works, but, in the light of that knowledge, to change how we live and relate to each other and other species. Calling for the environmental or ecological “revolution” in all spheres of life, including education, youth perspectives highlight the urgency to act as we re-imagine education and ways of living with the Earth.

Authors

• Iveta Silova, Arizona State University

• Ann Nielsen, Arizona State University