Jennifer Atkinson and Sarah Jaquette Ray, eds. The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World. University of California Press, May 2024.
The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World, edited by Jennifer Atkinson and Sarah Jaquette Ray, offers a new pedagogy for navigating the emotional aspects of ecological degradation and social injustice. As the editors explain, “With students coming into the classroom already aware of how bad things are, the old model of scaring them into caring is no longer working” (p. 1). Rather, educators are invited to focus on centring emotions in ways that support students’ ability to learn and build resilience in an age of crisis.
Across 37 chapters by scholars, educators, activists, artists, game designers, and others involved in climate justice education, the toolkit offers an initial response to such questions as:
- What would it take to help climate educators become trauma-informed?
- How can educators help students imagine thriving in a climate-changed world?
- How can educators do this work without doing further harm to themselves or to others?
The chapters explore a wide range of themes, including embodied pedagogies, storytelling and imagination, difficult knowledge, fear and joy, community and kinship, and skills for the Climate Generation. Such a vast collection of topics makes this toolkit useful across disciplines (note that a handy appendix sorts chapters by discipline).
The chapters explore a wide range of themes, including embodied pedagogies, storytelling and imagination, difficult knowledge, fear and joy, community and kinship, and skills for the Climate Generation.
Environmental historians and educators may be particularly interested in chapters identified as relating to history. For example, Chapter 13 explores the roots of the environmental justice movement and the author, Shane D. Hall, describes a class project on the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. In Chapter 22, Kimberly Skye Richards offers reflections on a pedagogy of discomfort and presents an assignment to engage students in creative activism. Chapter 27, by Kate Reavey, examines Indigenous involvement in climate stewardship and mitigation planning over time and includes an assignment researching treaty rights, legislation, and collaborative resistance.
In Chapter 5, “Empathy and Care: Activities for Feeling Climate Change,” I present a series of guiding questions and activities that educators can use to address the affective dimensions of climate change histories, while fostering empathy and care towards humans and more-than-humans in the past and present. The guiding questions can be applied to different historical contexts to generate discussions and support students’ emotional connections to the past. The activities encourage students—including those who may be apathetic to climate change—to empathize with human and more-than-human experiences over time, care about diverse perspectives, and express their feelings about environmental injustices.
In Chapter 5, “Empathy and Care: Activities for Feeling Climate Change,” I present a series of guiding questions and activities that educators can use to address the affective dimensions of climate change histories, while fostering empathy and care towards humans and more-than-humans in the past and present.
The guiding questions and activities of my chapter were inspired by conversations with other educators, as well as my own teaching experiences. Some of them have been facilitated with students before and others are offered as possibilities for what could be. Some activities include researching a local extinct or endangered species and presenting the history of its destruction from the perspective of that species; creating short “videos for change” that explain the historical roots of a climate-related issue and suggest ways to take action; and developing interactive signs for a garden or walking trail on campus that explore the history of human and more-than-human relations in the community.
In other places throughout the book, chapters offer interdisciplinary teaching strategies, lesson plans, and activities to support climate justice pedagogy. Student voices are also highlighted in reflections on their experiences with curricula that incorporates emotions. Collectively, the book provides insight into the challenges and possibilities that arise during learning experiences that attend to emotions, climate, and justice.
Feature Image: “Our Earth is Melting” by Kiah Shanks, teacher candidate in the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University (2021-22).
