Participatory research to address climate change and sustainability

‘What’s to become of us?’ This has been a common question around the world for the past 2 years as Covid-19 has continued to take lives, shatter economies, and cause us all to alter our plans for the future. But while our collective attention has been focused on the pandemic, a more serious crisis is looming and our failure – as individuals, communities, and nations – to respond will have dire consequences. Climate change is already ravaging coastlines, contributing to environmental disasters like the wildfires that have scorched millions of acres in Australia and California, leading to unprecedented loss of animal and plant species and exacerbating human suffering in the form of famine and loss of homes and property. Yet despite lofty promises for changes in policy and practice by world leaders, little real action has taken place to slow the rate of change.

‘What’s to become of us?’ can be heard as a lament or a complaint, but it can also be understood as a call to action. What becomes of us is up to us to determine and the authors in this Special Issue and the communities they represent offer us a range of potential responses.

As Paula Aamli points out in her article, ‘Connecting artfully in the context of the emerging climate crisis’ is ‘preeminently, a moral and ethical’ issue. As such, it requires our intimate and personal engagement, which she describes in the context of her own first-person action research experience of creating a poetic charting of her regular walks in her own community. By connecting records of her walks with various forms of poetic expression, she offers readers a strategy for creating their own forms of mindful engagement with nature as a way of reminding us of our obligation to protect and preserve the natural world around us.

A number of the articles included in this Special Issue focus on integrating climate change education into school curricula and on teacher professional development. Sharing Aamli’s focus on engagement with the natural environment, ‘Two stories of environmental learning and experience’ by David Zandvliet and Vajiramalie Perera describes a teacher education initiative in which participants were encouraged to find ways to increase their own students’ opportunities for outdoor learning. This article integrates the broader perspective of educational policy with the more grounded experience of teachers themselves. The challenges and rewards of engaging in this kind of pedagogy are given voice through the reflections of one of the teacher participants. As this educator observes, the process of doing action research ‘allowed me to think more deeply about my own practice while also giving a stronger rationale for continuing with (outdoor) environmental learning that I can share with my teacher colleagues and school leadership.’

Taking a different view of curriculum development, Michelle Darmody, in her article ‘Widening capabilities through a food and sustainability education initiative’, examines the critical, but all too often neglected, connection between how we understand the role of food and nutrition in human health and well-being and the creation of more sustainable food systems. Her example of a school-based project in the Republic of Ireland uses aspects of Sen’s Capability Approach and Youth Participatory Action Research to develop a project around Food and Biodiversity within the larger Green-Schools program. This student-led initiative generated practical outcomes like the creation of an edible garden and cooking workshops, all focused on the over-arching goal of encouraging participants – including students, staff, families and their communities – to take a more active role in shaping the way food is produced and consumed.

Recognizing the tensions between fostering continued learning and the importance of honoring students’ commitment to addressing the climate crisis through action, the researchers in Hilary Inwood’s study, ‘Growing action research on environmental learning in schools: A school–university partnership’ sought to find ways to engage students in activities directed at learning about climate change. Stories from teachers from early years upwards demonstrate the power of teacher action research to provide educators with the resources and support they need to develop innovative ways to engage students in learning about and acting to address climate change.

Teacher professional development is also the focus of Allan Feldman, Molly Nation and Katie Laux’s article, ‘The effects of extended action research-based professional development on the teaching of climate science’. Their year-long project provided participating educators with opportunities to critically examine their own practice around teaching climate change and to learn from one another through the exchange of stories and experiences. In addition to increasing teachers’ comfort with using discussion and argumentation in their classes, one especially important finding in my mind was that ‘the collaborative and supportive nature of these meetings, as noted by teachers, may have helped them to gain the confidence to teach [global climate change] as a scientific conclusion’. In the face of fierce resistance to this practice in some communities, having the courage and conviction to stand with the science is an important way in which teachers can promote greater awareness around this issue.

As noted above, approaching others, whether they be students or community members, to initiate conversations about climate change can be a daunting task. But, as Emily van Zee and Michele Crowl describe in their article, ‘Engaging students in discussing global climate change issues with friends and family’, providing pre-service teachers with a framework for engaging with friends and family can offer a supportive environment for testing the waters. The students who participated in this assignment gained confidence and developed skills for guiding such discussions, while at the same time having the opportunity to see first-hand the impact that they can have as teachers. As one participant noted, ‘I also learned that learning can inspire action and change in people, which is a really important thing to remember when entering the realm of teaching’.

In another example of teacher professional development, ‘Action research for education for sustainable development: The case of the university in-service course “Education for sustainable development – innovations in school and teacher education (BINE)”’, by Franz Rauch, Regina Steiner, and Peter Kurz describes the program they have developed to encourage educators to incorporate Education for Sustainable Development (EDS) into their teaching. They note that while the program is challenging for the participants, by providing ‘a balance of provocation and support’ the supervisors have been able to encourage more in-depth reflection among these educators around EDS.

In my own article, ‘Creating a virtual space for collaborative project planning using the future creating workshop process: Building the global climate change education initiative’, with co-authors Brownyn Williams, Socorro Aguja, Michaela Blumrich, Luiza De Sousa, Cathy Dzerefos, Bennet Kolb, Leonard Marimbe, Irene Muller, Genevieve Pillar, Maricar Prudente, Shira Rabin, Christa Rauch, Franz Rauch, and Alex Way, we describe an on-going international climate change education project with partners from Austria, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United States. More specifically, we present the way in which we adapted the Future Creating Workshop process to be conducted virtually to allow us to continue to plan for the future of our collaboration despite the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic.

While it is vital to integrate climate change education into our schools, as these articles point out, the truth of the matter seems to be that young people are getting the message, while policy-makers and industry leaders are continuing to ignore the calls for change. Simon Jorgenson and Jennie Stephens, in their article ‘Action research for energy system transformation’, draw upon three case studies to illustrate the ways in which systemic action research can serve as a platform for transforming energy systems to make them more democratic and sustainable. They offer a series of recommendations for bringing this about including the use of action research processes to imagine, experiment, and reflect on alternative ways of addressing this issue.

In ‘Action research in the plural crisis of the living: Understanding, envisioning, practicing, organising eco-social transformation’, Jonas Egmose, Henrik Hauggaard-Nielsen and Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen return to the personal by taking on the daunting task of connecting this to the broader processes of eco-social transformation. Drawing upon critical utopian action research, with its focus on bringing people together to imagine more democratic and generative futures, they invite us to become part of these broader processes of change.

Finally, in her review of Action Research in policy analysis: Critical and relational approaches to sustainability transitions edited by Koen Bartels and Julia Wittmayer (2018), Colleen Saxen reflects on the ways in which action research can be mobilized to impact policy decision-making through the experiences of the 10 authors included in this volume. Drawing upon a range of action research approaches and innovative strategies for presenting the findings of these projects, these authors offer readers strategies that they can adapt and apply to their own situations. Saxen also notes the inclusion of participant voices in the commentaries provided for each chapter as ‘testimonials for the primacy placed on relationships in action research’.

As these articles demonstrate, from the most intimate act of reflecting on the way in which our bodies move through space and guide our attentiveness to nature, to the large-scale transformation of energy systems, action research has the potential to deepen our understanding of climate change and to guide our actions in responding to the looming crisis in creative, inclusive, and effective ways. These articles also point to the ways in which working at multi-levels, the specific affordances and the various realms of action research contribute to the effectiveness this work can have in addressing climate change and sustainability.

Creating multi-level change

The change that accompanies such action research projects can, and hopefully does, take place at multiple levels from individual change in attitudes, understandings, and behaviours through to large-scale shifts in national and even international policy and practice. Aamli describes the way in which she used a first-person action research process to help her to become more attuned to the natural world around her through the simple act of walking and recording her experiences in brief, poetic form. Many of our other authors describe the kind of changes that take place in schools and classrooms when teachers and their students turn their attention to developing a better understanding of climate change and their role in addressing the causes and impacts of their action in addressing the problem in their community. Larger policy and system transformation are reflected in the work of Jorgenson and Stephens, and in Egmose et al.’s article. Change on all of these levels will be required if we are to address climate change and promote greater sustainability and community resiliency in any meaningful way.

Mobilizing the affordances of action research to address climate change

Action research also reflects a number of different qualities or affordances (Brydon-Miller et al. in press; Gibson 1979) that make it especially well equipped to respond to the shifting demands, tensions among stakeholders, and ambiguities of outcomes that accompany work in the area of climate change, education, action, and remediation. Flexibility, playfulness, a commitment to democratic practice, and a focus on practical outcomes are all qualities of action research that enable us to contend with complex problems. Zandvliet and Perera, for example, demonstrate how action research processes enable participants to use reflective practices to foster change in practice. Egmose et al. and my own co-authors take advantage of the focus on utopian imagination to guide our practice. Building trust is key to any action research process, and this is demonstrated in all of our school-based projects where partnerships between educators and university-based researchers and grounded in strong relationships. Relationships that enable the kind of ‘balance of provocation and support’ that are the key to growth as described by Rauch and his co-authors.

Contributions from the realms of action research

Action research also occupies different realms of practice from the Realm of Empathetic Relators, to the Realms of Emergent Designers and Dynamic Sense Makers, to the Realm of Advocates (Brydon-Miller, Ortiz-Aragón & Friedman, 2021). As our authors demonstrate, all good action research moves within these realms of practice, focusing at one point on fostering strong relationships, then at another on generating data that allows us to generate and test out new solutions to problems, and to then strive to inform policy and practice through advocacy. That said, I believe that it is this last realm of advocacy, and in particular our efforts to effect positive transformations in large-scale systems, that presents our greatest challenge in addressing climate change and sustainability. Here, the recommendations from Jorgenson and Stephens and from Bartels and Wittmayer, among others, are particularly helpful. But even with this, we will need to continue to try to find ways to empower communities to challenge powerful forces that seek to silence educators from discussing climate change with our students and to block attempts to move toward more sustainable and equitable futures.

What are we to become?

Perhaps, the most vital question we can ask then is not, ‘What’s to become of us?’, but rather, ‘What are we to become?’ In one way or another, all of the articles in this special issue address the question of transformation. How might we guide these transformations? Hilsen (2006) has de fined the notion of covenantal ethics as ‘the unconditional responsibility and ethical demand’ (p. 27) to act in the best interests of our fellow human beings and the natural world of which we are all a part. If we are to respond to this ethical demand, we must continue to reflect on our relationship to the natural world, strengthen our bonds with one another, work together to develop innovative solutions to the coming ‘plural crises’, and come together to challenge existing systems of power and privilege that block the way forward to more sustainable futures for the planet and more equitable and vibrant lives for its peoples.