Coastal communities in Latin America: Honoring children’s everyday sensemaking of changing lands and waters

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Latin America is home to some of the most diverse and vulnerable ecosystems in the world (Zalles et al., 2021). Formal education (and digital transformations) have the potential to support protecting these landscapes in the face of climate change, yet many school systems in the region lack the capacity. While we know that all learning environments facilitate particular nature-culture relations, the overwhelming placeless of schools continue to structure nature-culture divides where humans are considered apart from rather than a part of the natural world, living in concert with a multitude of more-than-human actors (Bang et al, 2012). Moreover, education that does directly address the climate crisis often leaves students overwhelmed, anxious, and immobilized (Bryan, 2022; Jones & Davison, 2021; Ojala, 2012; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020). As the climate crisis continues to permeate almost every sphere of global discourse, formal schooling is increasingly at the forefront of these conversations as a foundational site to ensure climate resilient futures. Schools and their educational systems are increasingly required to seriously reconsider their pedagogical decisions, curricular offerings, and the interactions among teachers, students, and the lands where they teach, learn, and live, given the drastically changing climate and the need to build more climate resilient communities especially with rising coasts and changing waters.

This symposium panel examines the roles of schooling in Chiapas, Mexico and Manabí, Ecuador, in two Pacific Ocean communities. Both research sites encompass lands and waters entangled in local and global nexus of fishing contestations, tourism, and challenges and promises of intergenerational life. In particular, we pay special attention to schooling practices in light of these entanglements and imagine potential interventions in schooling that welcome, affirm, and support children and families’ sensemaking about their places. Across the papers we ask: how does place shape and guide young people’s experiences and perceptions of climate change in coastal communities?

Drawing on empirical research conducted in coastal communities in Mexico and Ecuador, this panel explores how children and youth encounter, reflect on, and learn from their natural surroundings. Across three papers we pay particular attention to children’s intimate affective experiences of their changing lands and oceans. Understanding the emotions that students have with regards to climate change is the focus of several recent empirical studies in various contexts (Ferguson, 2022; Finnegan, 2022; Geiger et al., 2019; Kerret et al., 2020). Notable gaps in this research include an underrepresentation of cases from the Global South, as well as of studies that examine the role of local environmental change, and how child and youth perceptions of climate change are shaped by place. This session offers thinking about children's affect, agency, and the role of schooling as they both experience and design for locally based and globally significant climate issues in their home communities and the novel methods to study children’s experiences on lands.

The first and third paper come from the analysis of one Caminatas Comunitaria (community walks) in the community of El Pacifico that sits between a mangrove lagoon and the Pacific Ocean. The stories from this paper come from videos gathered while walking and storying lands (Marin & Bang, 2018), where family members and children share stories of place, with teachers and educational leaders positioned as witnesses and learners. In Paper One, we present two key episodes on family life on land using interaction analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995) to map local children’s affective and ethical interactions in the presence of their natural world ecosystems (mangrove forests, pacific ocean). We find that caminatas comunitarias made visible the ways intergenerational family life are rich ontological starting points for teaching and learning at school. Paper Three is based in the same community, and offers methodological insights on the role and agency of the natural world in children’s perspectives of changing lands and waters. Additionally, this paper highlights the intertwine of critical interaction and discourse analysis (Jordan & Henderson, 1995; Erickson, 2004) to better study and characterize the role of more-than-human actors in qualitative research on climate change.

The second paper explores the role of youth climate agency in the construction of environmental knowledge and perceptions of climate-related risk among secondary school students in coastal Ecuador. Using an interdisciplinary framework grounded in the capability approach (Robeyns, 2017; Sen, 2003) and critical science agency concepts (Schenkel & Calabrese Barton, 2020; Ballard et al., 2017), this paper seeks to answer the following questions: How is youth climate agency realized in coastal Ecuador? What practices and experiences support the development of youth climate agency? And finally, how do individual agency and aspirations shape youth perceptions of environmental risk? Data analysis from surveys with 193 students in two different secondary schools in coastal Ecuador, as well as interviews with 17 of these students show that youth climate agency hinged on local environmental conditions, intergenerational knowledge of place, and everyday household practices. Additionally, short-term, contingent events -- specifically, the El Niño phenomenon -- shaped youth visions of future climate risks and adaptation, as well as personal aspirations.

Session structure
The session will open with short remarks from the Chair to provide an overall structure of the session. We then transition to the first paper in the session. Each paper will have 12 minutes to present. Our discussant Dr. Joan DeJaeghere will thread common themes across the three papers and facilitate a conversation among all participants at the sessions.

Significance and Contributions
Each of the papers in this session offer detailed insights into the climate worlds of children and the processes in which students can be supported in the midst of devastating climate crisis. Together, papers in this panel highlight the roles of intergenerational learning, sense of place, and climate emotion in the ways that children and youth construct their own ethic of land care and love of place. Furthermore, these papers offer important insights and practice-based contributions into the ways in which schooling may enable students to imagine and enact sustainable futures and support families and communities in navigating the unprecedented climate challenges of our times.

Sub Unit

• Environmental and Sustainability Education SIG

Chair

• Neela Nandyal, St. Catherine University

Individual Presentations

• Cultivating relational worlds - * Meixi, University of Minnesota; Erma Fetić Mujić, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Giselle Caretto, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities; Maria Cecilia Schwedhelm, Independent Scholar

• Everyday citizen or eco-activist? Youth agency in imagining sustainable futures in coastal Ecuador - Neela Nandyal, St. Catherine University

• Caminatas as intergenerational participatory research with more-than-human worlds - Maria Cecilia Schwedhelm, Independent Scholar; Erma Fetić Mujić, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Giselle Caretto, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities; * Meixi, University of Minnesota

Discussant

• Joan DeJaeghere, University of Minnesota