School strikers enacting politics for climate justice: Daring to think differently about education

Abstract

Two school strikers − Niamh and Harriet − come together with two environmental education academics − Peta and Joseph − to explore what it means to be young people enacting politics for the environment in Australia, and what this might mean for re-imagining education. Niamh and Harriet are leaders of, and were integral to initiating, the highly effective School Strike 4 Climate − Australia (SS4C) movement, enacting ‘principled disobedience’. Peta and Joseph work in teacher education, preparing future teachers who will teach students who are increasingly climate savvy and politically active. In coming together and through the lens of pragmatism, we highlight the political nature of what Niamh and Harriet have been undertaking as they negotiate social, cultural, educational and environmental issues implicated in the climate crisis. Collaborative autoethnography framed our exploration of motivations for action, politics and education within our communities. Through Niamh’s and Harriet’s experiences, we explore how young people express agency while developing identity. Our autoethnographic conversations highlighted the experience and political agency that many of our young people demonstrate and led to us reflecting on the resulting opportunity for educators to ‘dare to think’ differently about education.

Innocent heroes or self‐absorbed alarmists? A thematic review of the variety and effects of storylines about young people in climate change discourses

“…Young people have themselves begun to actively cultivate spaces for their collective voices, action, and participation. They have centered their voices through engaging in youth-led activism (White et al, 2022), writing news articles and opinion pieces (Abhayawickrama, 2021), and co-authoring academic research (Tattersall et al, 2022). In engaging in these discourses many young people are seeking to participate in a radical transformation of the dominant social orders that have led to climate change.…”

“We’re fighting for our lives”: Centering affective, collective and systemic approaches to climate justice education as a youth mental health imperative

“…Existing conceptions of climate justice education, while still relatively nascent in the literature, do prioritize addressing the inequitable impacts of the causes and effects of climate change and deepening understandings of structural root causes (McGregor and Christie, 2021;Stapleton, 2018;Svarstad, 2021;White et al, 2022). I am inspired by and think with decolonial scholars, including Boaventura De Sousa Santos (2018), Arturo Escobar (2020), Walter Mignolo (2011) and Sultana (2022b), to build on these conceptions and those within the field of climate justice more broadly to advance the framings of climate justice education.…”

Towards an understanding of how school climate strikes work as public pedagogy

“…Fridays for Future and SS4C have grown to become global and national student-led movements that lead "all walks of life" in climate activism. School strikers explain that they learn valuable life skills, including developing their capacity for leadership and knowledge about political systems and democratic processes through participating in these movements and organising school climate strikes (Tattersall et al, 2022;White et al, 2022). They further develop skills in leadership and mobilisation by participating in programs led by other young people, including those facilitated by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) and SEED Indigenous Youth Climate Network Australia (Collin and Matthews, 2021).…”

“…They further develop skills in leadership and mobilisation by participating in programs led by other young people, including those facilitated by the Australian Youth Climate Coalition (AYCC) and SEED Indigenous Youth Climate Network Australia (Collin and Matthews, 2021). These insights suggest that through their participation in school climate strikes young people are developing their capacities for political and social justice activism, in ways that White et al (2022) explain are not always possible within the formalised structure of schooling, particularly in Australia.…”