This collection offers innovative approaches to using popular forms of storytelling as a lens for teaching about climate change. Contributors share their classroom experiences and guidance about how to engage students in productive conversations about the future with empathy and agency.

Climate Change Education: Reimagining the Future with Alternative Forms of Storytelling offers innovative approaches to teaching about climate change through storytelling forms that appeal to today’s students—climate fiction and protest poetry, fiction and documentary films, video games and social media. The stories are used as exemplars, from exploring space debris to urban design planning to fast fashion, and they provide entry points for investigating particular aspects of climate science, including the local and global impacts of a warming planet. Each chapter provides analyses and strategies for fostering climate (and space) literacy through knowledge, empathy, and agency. Contributors from around the world encourage educators to answer students’ calls for comprehensive K–12 climate education by aligning pedagogy with real-world challenges in order to prepare students who understand the myriad injustices of the climate crisis and feel empowered to confront them. They share their own stories and urge educators to join the growing, hopeful movement for action, classroom by classroom.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: Reading the Youth Climate Movement: Social Media, Literary Creation, and Allyship

Alexandra Lakind

Chapter 2: “But, What Difference Can I Make?”: Using Documentaries to Explore Environmental Advocacy in the Face of Climate Change

Carley Peterson Durden and Jared Durden

Chapter 3: Educating Space-Age Environmentalists at the Elementary Level

Beverly B. Bachelder and Robert S. Bachelder

Chapter 4: Teaching Environmental Respect to Young Learners: Video Games as Environmental Texts

Erden El

Chapter 5: A City for the Future: Designing Socially Just, Sustainable Urban Environments with Elementary Students

Alexandra Laing

Chapter 6: Fostering Environmentalism and Activism in Students: Plastic Pollution as a Starting Point

Karen Ball and Elke DeVries

Chapter 7: Ecohorror, Terrorism, and Inadequate Representation of Global Warming in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening

Tatiana Konrad

Chapter 8: The Global Impact of Fast Fashion: Understanding Sustainability and Social Justice Issues

Helen Liu and Alyssa Racco

Chapter 9: Making the Material Turn: A Pedagogical Approach on Postcolonial, Social, and Ecological Issues in Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy’s Essays and Fiction

Suhasini Vincent

Chapter 10: Creating Authentic Learning Experiences: Interdisciplinary Climate Change Instruction and Assessment

Mary-Alice Corliss and Rebecca L. Young

Afterword

Vandana Singh

About the Contributors