Project Lead: Marcelina Piotrowski (Lecturer, Educational Studies)
Project Description
Environmental education courses have an implied commitment to transformative learning and educational solutionism; however, students increasingly face anxiety about climate change (Stein, 2024) and burnout from environmental education (Verlie, 2019), and need more opportunities to discuss the ways in they may be stuck between discourses of ‘hope’ and caring for themselves ‘at the end of the world’ (Stein, 2024). This project aims to understand students’ experience of environmental education through a lens of ‘ambiguity’ in which students explore their feelings and develop intellectual stamina to discuss difficult modernist and colonial histories of environmental education (ghosts), the limits of solutionism and their alternatives (monsters), and intellectual impasses.
Research Questions
- How do students perceive an environmental education course designed around intellectual impasses as helping them navigate climate and environmental issues?
- To what extent do students benefit from the challenges and possible discomfort that moving beyond educational solutionism can have in an environmental education course?
- How do students describe their intellectual stamina (ability to be equipped with conceptual tools to discuss difficult topics in sustained ways) as a result of taking a course developed around impasses and ambiguity?