Teaching climate through fiction

The Road, The Lord of the Rings, Parable of the Sower, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Vegetarian, Oryx and Crake, and even texts from the literary canon, such as Pride and Prejudice... are some of the fictional works being used to address climate issues that many secondary/ upper-secondary students encounter as part of their teaching at school. Perhaps you are one of the many teachers who use fiction as a didactic tool in their teaching? Perhaps you use one of the works above, or other works of climate fiction, dystopian fiction, utopian fiction, or an ecocritical perspective of the literary canon to teach about climate issues? For our research study, we are now looking for teachers and students in secondary or upper-secondary school who use fiction, drama, poetry or feature films in their teaching about climate issues.

Addressing Climate in the Curriculum

The purpose of this study is to increase knowledge about how fiction and feature films can be used to teach about climate issues, with a focus on classroom interaction and how teachers and students discuss the literature or films.Addressing Climate in the Curriculum

Sweden has integrated the UNECE strategy for Education for Sustainable Development and the Agenda 2030 action plan—including Goal 4, Quality Education—into the national curriculum at all levels (Swedish National Commission for UNESCO, 2007; 2021). At the upper-secondary level, the curriculum emphasizes that teaching should give students insights to help prevent environmental harm and develop a personal approach to global environmental issues (National Agency for Education in Sweden, 2024, p. 4).

How is the study conducted?

The teaching will be recorded using one or more video cameras and voice recorders. The researcher will be present before the teaching to allow the teacher and students to ask questions, but will not participate in the teaching itself. The lesson will be conducted as if it had not been recorded, and the researcher will not participate in the planning or execution of the teaching.

Data management and confidentiality

What is said during the recorded teaching will be treated confidentially. The video recordings will be analyzed by the researcher. In isolated cases, shorter clips from the recordings may be shown to the closest research group in order to assist with the analysis of the material. The analyses that are published will be based on anonymized transcriptions of what is said during the lessons. The video recordings will not be distributed to third parties or posted online. The person responsible for the personal data, i.e. in this case the participants' names, school and words, is Linköping University. The personal data will be decoded and anonymized in all material that may be shown or published. The video recordings will be stored on a separate hard drive that will be locked and only handled by the researcher and the responsible researcher at the university. In order not to disrupt the teaching, everyone in the class, or in a group if group discussions occur, needs to agree to participate.

The project has been approved by the Swedish Ethics Review Authority (ref. 2024-05820-01)

Would you like to participate in the study?

If you are interested or know someone who might be, you can contact dakota.lagercrantz@liu.se for an informal conversation. Whether the students participate or not does not affect the teacher's assessment of the teaching.

Data collection is planned to continue in 2025.