Education in a changing climate: reconceptualising school and classroom climate through the fiery atmos-fears of Australia’s Black summer

ABSTRACT

The concepts ‘school climate’ and ‘classroom climate’ refer to patterns of interpersonal relations that influence children’s learning and wellbeing. However, they are typically grounded in anthropocentricism and focus on human, rather than meteorological, relationships. Relatedly, climate change education is typically concerned with the climate as it exists outside the classroom. We advocate for increased attention to education in a changing climate. We argue that the concept of climatic-affective atmospheres can enable education to better attune and respond to children’s climatic relations as they unfold within and beyond school campuses. To do so, we trace the affective atmospheres of Australia’s 2019/2020 Black Summer of extreme bushfires and smoke pollution and the multiple ways children became entangled with these more-than-human forces. We explore children’s participation in political protests about the bushfires and climate change (including school strikes), and the ways the socio-meteorological atmospheres of the summer infiltrated and disrupted two school classrooms.

KEYWORDS:

• Bushfires
• smoke
• climate change
• affective atmospheres
• education
• emotion

Acknowledgements

This paper was written on stolen and unceded Gadigal, Dja Dja Wurrung and Bundgalung country. We pay respects to elders past, present and emerging.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 By the time of the interviews Australia was in the process of moving to working/learning from home and then lockdowns to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.

2 This letter and the attached information sheets were sent to Simone and signed by the Prime Minister and the Minister for Education. We do not know how broadly they were circulated, and the two teachers we spoke to had no knowledge of the letters or the initiatives they promoted.