Dr Julia Dehm and colleagues from La Trobe’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences have published a paper to progress an interdisciplinary agenda for teaching in the climate crisis.
“Pedagogy in the context of climate change must be attuned to complex and varied student experiences that can contend with feelings of anxiety, disconnection, distress and hopelessness,” says Dr Dehm.
“It is widely recognised that new teaching practices are needed in an era of climate change but there has been less examination of what this could look like and how these practices can be introduced in the classroom.”
To address this, the interdisciplinary team reflected on their teaching practices and developed an agenda for teaching in the climate crisis.
“Our paper is a collaboration between scholars from law, art history, environmental history and humanities, politics, archaeology, development studies, anthropology and human geography,” says Dr Dehm.
“We present a selection of case study examples that offer teaching practices that aim to be reflexive, effective, broadly representational, attuned to language and power, multi- scaled, able to centralise Indigenous knowledge, and provide an opportunity for creative action and activism,” says Dr Dehm.
“We also suggest ways in which we might empower students is to move from learner to knower to actor.”
Co-authors of the paper were Steph Houghton, Jillian Garvey, Liz Conor, Brooke Wilmsen, Ruth Gamble, Ben Habib, Katie Holmes, Jacqueline Millner and Keir Strickland from La Trobe’s School of Social Sciences and Humanities.
Read the paper here.
