Confronting Climate Crises through Education

Confronting Climate Crises through Education: Reading Our Way Forward envisions the responsibility of public education to engage a citizenry more prepared to address the challenges of a changing world. Young advocates a paradigm shift that positions ecopedagogy as the central organizing principle of curriculum and assessment design. Each chapter outlines ways literature can serve as a cultural lens for examining the complex patterns of contexts behind our most pressing climate concerns, including potential solutions these patterns may illuminate. A focus on fiction and non-fiction exemplars that can provide such a lens illustrates practical steps educators can take to develop instruction around the immediately relevant environmental crises we are experiencing and to inspire more ecologically conscious, globally-minded problem-solvers prepared to confront them.

If educators take Rebecca Young?s advice to harness the power of imaginative world-making and empathetic reading, perhaps we have a chance not only to confront climate crisis but to persuade young people to take tangible steps to repair and protect our environment. A first step would be to recover the original sense of empathy, with Einfühlung, a feeling-into the inanimate world upon which we depend.

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