Editorial: Storytelling towards solidarity: Creative, hopeful, and inclusive climate change education

Abstract

Geography is a discipline that speaks to students’ imaginations (Hammond et al., 2022). However, for learners and educators, imagination can take shape against a backdrop of existential ecological concern, where climate change “encompasses and exacerbates nearly every other problem threatening human progress in the twenty first century” (United Nations, 2014, p.30). Learners and educators are exposed to an abundance of information about climate change that can be divisive, impersonal, and difficult to process. Scholars increasingly acknowledge that scientific accounts alone “do not offer relatable, connective or inspiring accounts of human-climate relationships” (Verlie, 2022, p. 3).

The papers in this special section illustrate different ways in which storytelling is helping learners and educators to understand their entanglements with climate change across times and places, and to build collective responses with solidarity at their centre. Together, the papers highlight valuable affordances of stories and storytelling in the context of climate change education (CCE). Stories generate empathy, enable personal and collective sense-making, and can mobilise transnational solidarity. In a highly uneven global landscape of climate vulnerability and agency, the papers also show different meanings of climate justice for young people to address the climate crisis and its complexity and the inequalities written therein.

Our aim to create a collection of storytelling papers themed around solidarity in CCE was motivated primarily by the young people whom we have spoken to in our research and teaching, but it also ties together calls for more attention to empathy, inclusivity, and creativity in CCE. Scholars have advanced arguments to expand CCE beyond the domain of scientific knowledge to better engage and support learners who report feeling overwhelmed and anxious because of climate change (Baker et al., 2020; Halstead et al., 2021; Trott, 2024; Verlie, 2022; Walker et al., 2022). Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (2020), p.203) have completed a systematic review of CCE highlighting the marginalisation of arts and humanities in CCE and have called for participatory and creative approaches that “empower children and young people to meaningfully engage with entanglements of climate fact, value, power and concern across multiple scales and temporalities” and that are “open to radical and visionary alternatives for the future.”

The capacity for stories to open the imagination to alternative futures has been further explored by those who have used speculative fiction in their research and teaching practice (Bowman & Germaine, 2022; Finnegan, 2023). Other researchers have noted that storytelling can inspire agency and action, opening space for communities to imagine the kinds of futures they would like to see, and enabling community members to bridge “the narrative gap between our ‘now’ and visions of the future” (Veland et al., 2018, p.45). Opportunities to think and imagine alternative futures with stories grounded in students’ everyday contexts are particularly important in the context of climate anxiety, where students have reported feeling hopeless because of government inaction and a sense of paralysis (Hickman et al., 2021).

Calls for storytelling in CCE are also informed by arguments for transforming climate change communication. Communication scholars have argued that scientific policy reporting creates narratives that can be alienating to many (Bloomfield & Manktelow, 2021) and that are often presented in ways that restrict the possibility of other perspectives and agendas (de Meyer et al., 2021). Bloomfield and Manktelow (2021) have argued that the use of storytelling conventions would allow scientific reporting on climate change to follow a communication model that is more engaging to wider publics and more action-oriented. However, arguments for innovating climate storytelling extend beyond arguments to address how scientific communications are structured to those that call for a much more radical re-envisioning of the stories told about climate and ecological breakdown, its causes and solutions. Reflecting on the concentration of stories that veer between doom and technoscientific solutions in the context of fragile human-environmental relationships, Kelly et al. (2022, p. xiv) have argued that “it matters what stories tell stories”—that is, which stories of climate and ecological change gain traction in contemporary societies, and who or what shape these. Such examples of recent scholarship illustrate the powerful potential of storytelling practices and the ways in which conventions and uneven access to platforms on which to voice stories can hamper and enable this potential.

Attention to whose stories are heard and to what is being missed is core to the essential decolonizing work taking place in geography education (Pirbhai-Illich & Martin, 2022). Rethinking CCE in this way means moving from understanding climate change primarily as a technological problem with technological solutions to making sense of climate change through origin stories, Indigenous knowledges, and learning from the Earth itself (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020; Fricker, 2024). It is essential to acknowledge the exclusion of Indigenous and First Nations knowledge systems and practices from most formal CCE (Allen & Ní Cassaithe, 2024; Pirbhai-Illich & Martin, 2022). Observing the history of Australian education and considering what has been excluded by the separation of people and Country, Fricker (2024, p. 169) has written that “by excluding the environment beyond the classroom for learning, Western pedagogies effectively excluded any possibility to incorporate learning through engaging with Country.” Similarly, the Common Worlds Research Collective’s commentary, “Education for future survival” (, 2020), reflects on how Cartesian models of education have caused societies to lose connection with the Earth and put the survivability of all planetary life at risk. Both Fricker (2024) and the Common Worlds Research Collective (2020) have argued that reimagined education can reorient humanity back to future survival. Storytelling is a fitting and accessible way to bring diverse knowledge into classrooms and it is a technique that could be used much more in CCE.

From these lofty aims, this special section aims to demonstrate that storytelling is an accessible practice for diverse individuals and groups to create and share knowledge on climate change using stories’ interpersonal and geographical affordances. In foregrounding geographical affordances, we are not claiming that geography or geographers have an exclusive role in building more hopeful and inclusive CCE. However, we echo arguments made in this journal by Davidson et al. (2023) that geography has a central role to play in responding to the complexity of climate change, and we see an openness to incorporate storytelling into learning as part of the “renewed geographical education” that those authors call for. Stories of climate change are inherently geographical: they are rooted in, have been shaped by, and open listeners’ imaginations to different times and places (including those imagined but not yet lived). The multi-perspectival affordances of stories across time and space fit with Andrews’ (2014) vision of stories as providing ways to connect “the real, the not-real and the not-yet-real” by mobilising the narrative imagination. As well as a temporal process, this is a spatial process, for “[q]uestions of space not only direct us to where one is, but also to where one has been, and where one might go - questions which are as much about physical realities as they are connected to our innermost imaginaries” (Andrews, 2014, pp. 6–7). As becomes evident in the papers that follow, stories offer ways to situate the effects of climate change as people and place are interwoven in narratives that zoom in on particular lives and relationships in time and space.

We now outline the contributions of the seven papers that form the special section. We then draw out four affordances of storytelling illustrated by the papers: (1) imagining alternatives; (2) enabling multi-way learning; (3) building solidarity across difference; and (4) realising climate justice. We end this editorial by briefly signposting some practical ways of using the methods and approaches in these papers in different pedagogic contexts.

The papers that comprise this special section illustrate children and young people’s role as storytellers, as enablers of others’ stories, and as critical and empathetic listeners.

Eric Magrane’s paper is a reflective narrative essay about coordinating an interdisciplinary climate change communication class in a United States University. The author describes the class as providing “a collaborative approach to climate change education.” It comprises a public climate change speaker series where students nominate and introduce speakers and a speculative storytelling activity in which students imagine the year 2100 when people and societies have mitigated and adapted to the climate crisis. Magrane’s paper includes extracts from students’ stories and reflects on the dialogues resulting from students’ willingness to share their stories. The author concludes that stories and respectful dialogue “have an important part to play in visualizing and realizing more just, lively futures built on love and care.”

In their paper, Sacha McMeeking and colleagues supported Indigenous-led education methods for climate leadership and decision-making in Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Through community-engaged action research, they invited Māori and Pacific Elders to co-design workshops for young people from those communities. Elders drew on established storytelling practices, characters, and tropes to support participants’ understanding of themselves and their communities as climate adaptation leaders. The authors present this work as a continuation of the intergenerational storytelling embedded in Māori and Pacific cultures. They argue that Indigenous storytelling offers a more hopeful alternative to dominant narratives that veer between climate catastrophe and redemption through science-led “solutionism.”

Katie Parsons and colleagues’ work is about UK-based learners and teachers’ responses to two videos that tell the stories of flood-affected children in that country. Those flood-affected children’s stories were collated into two videos that put viewers in the shoes of two fictional characters. In workshops, young people were asked to respond to and offer further suggestions for the development of the videos. The author also interviewed secondary educators who had used the videos with their classes. A key theme of the paper is how place-based stories can be used across geographical contexts to support empathy- and action-informed responses to flood risk preparedness and adaptation.

The capacity for stories to generate empathy through imagination is also taken up by Candice Satchwell and colleagues. They tell the story of a collaboration between a school in northwest England and a Fijian island where primary school pupils exchanged videos, drawings, and letters to learn about the impacts of climate change where the other children live. The paper shows how first-hand, peer-led insights into different contexts can enhance children’s environmental education, bringing climate change to life as a topic that affects real children across the world.

Rosamund Portus and colleagues’ paper reflects on children and young people as researchers. It does so by presenting methodological insights into co-productive research exploring young people’s sense of agency to influence climate change policy in Finland, Ireland, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Focusing on the experiences of young advisors to the project, the authors consider how co-production can offer meaningful ways to share stories about climate crisis. They observe how the advisors drew on their personal engagements and responses to the climate crisis to aid project development. Whilst the paper’s main contribution is to extend co-production methodologies, the authors reflect that young people’s use of personal stories in the research was an integral part of the project’s development.

Carlie Trott’s paper is concerned with counter-stories obscured by dominant narratives of ‘climate catastrophe’ and with critical thinking about climate solutions that can be garnered from those counter-stories. She draws on in-depth interviews with young climate activists in the United States. In ways similar to work by McMeeking and colleagues in their reflections on Indigenous storytelling, Trott has suggested that, in a context where justice and action are little considered in CCE, young people’s “stories into activism” could be used in educational settings “to activate learners’ political imaginations and spur their active engagement in societal transformation.”

Finally, Catherine Walker and colleagues draw on research conducted with first- and second-generation migrants in Manchester, United Kingdom, and Melbourne, Australia, to explore how parents and children who grew up in places different from where they currently live now talk about climate change. They analyse interviews that young people conducted with their first-generation migrant parents and consider how the stories that parents embedded in their interviews made their experiences relatable to their children, anchoring them in children’s life-worlds by connecting to shared family memories. The paper illustrates how young researchers saw potential for diverse transnational knowledge (such as that shared by their parents) to inform how they and others learn about climate change through storytelling.

Across the papers, we identify four ways that geographical storytelling contributes to more creative, hopeful, and inclusive CCE.

Because storytelling is a universal practice, stories about climate change are being told in different ways around the world, in classrooms and beyond. The special section documents diverse ways in which storytelling is being used to build solidarity and contribute to generating more creative, hopeful, and inclusive CCE. This work is particularly important in light of some young people’s reluctance to engage with climate change learning because of the “doomism” with which it has become associated. The papers also highlight innovative ways in which educators at all levels are using stories and storytelling to overcome such feelings, whilst acknowledging their own emotions on climate change.

Storytelling is enabled and constrained by social expectations and political possibilities in the spaces where it occurs, and these expectations and possibilities determine what kinds of activities and lessons can be a part of school curricula. It is notable that almost all of the research in this special section has been conducted partly or entirely outside of formal educational spaces, even when projects and initiatives were supported by schools. There are, then, significant possibilities for the storytelling taking place outside of classrooms to disrupt existing ways of thinking about climate change. Such possibilities reinforce the value of collaborations between schools and wider practices of community learning (Allen & Ní Cassaithe, 2024; Fricker, 2024), and we encourage more researchers to build such collaborations, wherever possible.

In this editorial, we have sought to highlight the geographical affordances of storytelling for building more inclusive, hopeful, and creative CCE, and we encourage readers to reflect further on these affordances in the context of their own teaching and research practice. Ultimately, we trust this special section will inspire educators, students, researchers, and members of the broader communities of which they are part to consider the ways that storytelling can build greater solidarity in the process of realising climate justice.