Zones of Proximal (Dis)Comfort: The Potential Uses of Climate Fiction in Fostering Hope (Poster 8)

• In Event: Attending to Climate and Environmental Hope, Despair, and Repair Through Storytelling

Abstract

Objectives
Climate catastrophe will disproportionately affect the younger generations; emerging evidence on climate emotions warns of the risk of apathy and skepticism in the face of increasing precarity (Haltinner & Sarathchandra, 2018; Lertzman, 2013). Given this, teachers must know how to walk between despair and hope with their students (e.g., Suarez et al., 2024). Here, I describe how two teacher educators and twenty-two pre-service teachers (PSTs) understood the potential of climate fiction (CliFi) as a vehicle for hope.

Framework
I use the idea of modest utopias, “specifically those in the form of institutional innovations in educational settings” which are “crucial in preparing societies for more comprehensive and far-reaching transformations” (Rajala, et al., 2023, p. 113). I connect this model of modest and co-designed utopias with literature on the potential uses of CliFi in envisioning possible futures (Lindgren Leavenworth & Manni, 2021; Milkoreit, 2016; Schneider-Mayerson et al., 2023) and literature on the uses of art to mitigate climate emotions (Bentz & O’ Brian, 2019; Chappell & Chappell, 2016)

Methods
Like utopian methodologies of Rajala et al. (2023), this work uses Design-Based Intervention Research where researchers design learning environments “that can guide the process of envisioning, implementing, sustaining, and critically evaluating the more radical forms of educational activity systems” (p. 110). The intervention was the redesigned first quarter of secondary English Language Arts methods class that incorporated curated CliFi, discussion, and art making.

Data and Analysis
Data include PST reflections and art pieces from two cohorts of PST over two years and notes from teacher- and PST-led discussions on both young adult CliFi novels and CliFi short stories. I coded data first using open codes, then pattern coding using consolidated codes of emergent themes (Saldaña, 2009).

Results
PSTs identified ways in which their future students would need to sit between the waves of difficult emotions caused by climate catastrophe and the radical vision of a different future. This creates a messy and precarious kind of hope that one PST described as a “zone of proximal comfort:” an “emotional place where you are not so emotionally dysregulated that you shut down, but you are uncomfortable enough that you have to turn to your community for support.” Similarly, one PST observed, “I think it’s important to have students sit with their climate anxiety in a way that isn’t completely paralyzing. What support might students need to face their climate anxiety? How can students harness their anxiety to take action?” Still another PST observed that “We can use climate fiction…to help students sit with climate anxiety in an adaptive, rather than maladaptive way.”

Significance
Many teachers struggle to help students cope with challenging climate emotions such as anxiety, apathy, and grief. In reading CliFi and processing it through art making and discussion, PSTs identified ways in which they imagine helping students sit between these difficult emotions and the potential for a different future. This is a kind of precarious hope that—PSTs speculated—might drive student climate action if well supported in a classroom setting.

Author

• Maia Goodman Young, University of Washington