Kids communicating climate change: learning from the visual language of the SchoolStrike4Climate protests

ABSTRACT

Since 2018, school students around the world have gone on strike from school to call on leaders to take decisive action on climate change. Prominent in the resultant rallies are placards created by participants – from small children to their adult allies. This paper explores how students in the movement enact and activate visual approaches to communicating their concerns regarding climate change. By analysing the signage created by protestors at the largest yet rally held in Sydney, in September 2019, we situate the protests as a unique space for students’ political voice. Our analysis of the signs and placards held by children finds that students use creative, mixed-media construction methods and draw on culturally significant objects and images to produce and visually communicate perspectives on climate change. This study shows how placards leverage emotional responses of anger, amusement and empathy to reflect the political, social and environmental dimensions of climate change, and collective demands for urgent policy action. In doing this, we highlight the role of visual communication in public protests and civic discourse, and the potential benefits to education on climate change. The visual language of the protest reinforces the critical or immediate nature of climate change to students as they draw on temporal symbols to communicate how they relate to climate change. We argue that these findings highlight the importance of creative, participatory and visual methods for student learning – and co-creating climate change education.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change education
• student activism
• protest
• visual communication
• political emotions
• student voice

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge all the students and their allies who attended the 20 September 2019 SchoolStrike4Climate rally in Sydney and who are part of the ongoing global movement for action on Climate Change. The data for this paper is part of a broader project on the Student Climate Action movement in Australia and our co-investigators in that work are Stewart Jackson, Brendan Churchill, Judith Bessant, Rob Watts and Faith Gordon. We thank Peter Chen and Ariadne Vromen for their support to take photos at the 20 September 2019 SchoolStrike4Climate rally in Sydney.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The global movement is a network of autonomous movements acting in a coordinated way but under several different names including FridaysForFuture. In Australia, the student-led movement is organised as SchoolStrike4Climate and this is the name we refer to throughout the paper.

2. This use of “connective” references the concept of “connective action” by Bennett and Segerberg (2012). Connective action describes the ways contemporary social movements leverage digital media to produce easily personalisable and meme-like messages and media content.

3. Sydney is a large, multicultural city in Australia (a country with high levels of digital inclusion). This was one of the largest protest sites with an estimated 80,000 participants.

4. Scott Morrison was Prime Minister of Australia in 2019.