“The climate crisis is a crisis of culture”: How can educators center critical discussions about climate change in schools?

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Re(questioning) critical concerns through qualitative research

Proposal

In the summer of 2018, I traveled to the state of Kerala in India, to conduct a preliminary dissertation study to learn student narratives about the purpose of education and schooling. Coloma’s (2013) argument for the relevance of empire as a category of analysis in education research, and Connell’s (2007) proposal to adopt a Southern theoretical framework for social science research, inspired my conceptual framework and methods. I wanted to explore the ways in which histories of imperialism, and the practices of colonial modernity, were shaping the ways in which high school students in a government school in Kerala (referred to as ENKHS in this proposal), made sense of issues of social justice, identity, and the politics of difference. When I arrived at ENKHS in mid-July 2018, it was functioning as a disaster relief camp for people who had lost their homes in the torrential rain and flooding that had ravaged this south Indian state.
The school started functioning normally a few days after the water from the first round of floods subsided, and I spent four weeks at ENKHS, using ethnographic methods to explore my research questions. Themes that emerged from my field notes and interviews centered around how religion, class, gender, and the dominance of meritocratic values interacted with, and shaped student perspectives about the purposes of education. The rain and floods stayed at the periphery of my conversations and interactions at ENKHS, just as the crisis of climate change and the agency of non-human entities (Ghosh, 2016; De León, 2014) have remained at the periphery of my scholarly work. Bruno Latour suggests that one of the characteristics of modernity is the project of “partitioning” (Latour, 1993, cited in Ghosh, 2016) that separates Nature and Culture, with the former being siloed into the realm of science. This could explain the gap in my own inquiry, and the tendency for educators like me to relegate climate change to the realm of environmental science education. However, Ghosh (2016) argues that the “climate crisis is a crisis of culture [that is] intimately linked with wider histories of imperialism and capitalism” that have generated desires that drive the carbon economy. He critiques different modes of cultural activity like poetry, art, literature, and I would argue educational practices, for being “drawn into modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight”, and for resisting to engage critically with the climate crisis.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report released in October 2018, confirm that we are leaving a planet that is on the brink of destruction, to the next generation. I would like to use this presentation as an opportunity to explore ways in which we as educators can center discussions about climate change in our schools, not as scientific explorations into its causes and consequences, but as a way to acknowledge to the future inheritors of this planet, that the dominant cultural paradigms of our times haven’t left them much to be optimistic about.

Author

• Naivedya Parakkal, University of Michigan, Doctoral student