A didactic toolkit for climate change educators: lessons from constructive journalism for emotionally sensitive and democratic content design

Abstract

Climate change education is seen as an important contributor to climate change mitigation. Yet, its predominant focus on cognitive learning tends to omit the emotional effects of learning about climate change, which often entails learners feeling anxious and overwhelmed and therefore struggling to engage with and enact ‘solutions’. This paper addresses a gap in current environmental education research relating to the role that the design of educational content might play in engaging with the emotional dimension of learning in environmental and sustainability education. In this effort, the paper draws on constructive journalism to provide an account of how the design of content influences the appropriation of content on both a cognitive and emotional level by the learner. The paper outlines three content design tools (solutions orientation, future orientation, community orientation) that aim to reconcile the emotional and cognitive dimensions of learning while supporting the agency of learners and a democratic conception of climate change education.

Keywords:

• Climate change education
• constructive journalism
• content design
• emotional learning
• cognitive learning

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Hanna Hofverberg for earlier comments on the ideas outlined in this paper and the reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We take our understanding of content design from the Swedish didactical conception of teaching as meningserbjudande (suggestion of meaning) as outlined by Englund (1997). Teaching is here seen as a contingent practice of discursive and dialogical engagement with students’ meaning-making processes. We add to this conception a focus on the contingency of the content and how didactical engagement with meaning-making and suggestions of meaning relates to the presentation of content, where different choices of presentation will lead to different possible meanings as well as emotional responses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Juliane V. Höhle

Juliane V. Höhle is a PhD student at the centre for sustainable development at the department of political sciences at Ghent University. She is part of the LESTRA project investigating learning processes in sustainability transitions.

Stefan L. Bengtsson

Stefan L. Bengtsson is a senior lecturer in curriculum and instruction at the department of education, Uppsala University.