Cultivating Digital Climate Archives as Pedagogy

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The Role of Digital Media in Climate Change Education and Communication

Proposal

The topic of climate change has been integrated into mainstream education systems worldwide within the last decade. This paper engages with the study of climate change as framed within formal educational contexts and suggests new approaches to teaching and learning about the topic. The paper calls for pedagogical practices of cultivating digital climate archives as an engaged form of teaching and learning. The specificity of context and place in engaged pedagogy offer forms of accountability and narratives that contest universalizing teaching and learning practices. In particular, the paper addresses the implications of rendering all human life as a single variable within universal approaches to climate change within school curricula (Harris, 2021).

It is becoming ever clearer that the global West lacks the fortitude to slow or stop the escalating catastrophe at hand. Amongst the unwillingness to follow through on climate promises, growing credibility gaps on local, national, and global scales provide an urgent call for accountabilities for climate injustices. Shifting from the repetitious urgencies that reinscribes disaster in the present and impending catastrophe on the horizon, the paper aims to rearticulate shifts in thinking about the catastrophic as already here, articulating and archiving patterns of climate change through pedagogical approaches on an intimate level.

Drawing from the author’s formative community-based digital archival recordings and inspired by digital practices of citizen science, the paper identifies patterns within local communities and landscapes that offer different lenses for addressing a changing climate as they relate to wetland, river, and lake ecologies in particular. In doing so, the paper illustrates the importance of considering the intricacies and pluralities of spatial thought in race (Black Geographies) alongside the connections between antiblackness, the exploitation of nature, and the imperatives of ecological justice through alternative forms of living (Black Ecologies). In doing so, the paper suggests moves toward educational practices that document changing social-ecological formations, revealing knowledge produced by and with communities. Such processes bear witness to the current crisis and offer perspectives on futures outside of destruction.

Ecological locations and relations are most often defined through brief periods of scientific monitoring. Alternatively, cultivating digital climate archives as pedagogy provides place-based knowledge through photos, videos, maps, stories, and other artifacts—to rethink the purposes of curriculum in relation to accountably and future climate reparations. Everyday histories and accounts—related to ongoing production of knowledge of people and place passed down over multiple generations—are not commonly perceived as significant or legitimate forms of scientific and ecological fact (Williams & Riley, 2020). This paper suggests that decentering ideas of environmental expertise and knowledge production through everyday digital pedagogies can provide key interventions in pursuit of more nuanced, layered, and liberatory ways of understanding changes in climate-situated ecological context refusing reproductions of top-down accounts and instead providing nuanced accounts and of social and ecological events and changes over time. Such community archival practices are not bound by practices that produce capital, value, and difference.

Author

• Benjamin D Scherrer, State University of New York