scholarly journals ART FOR CHANGE: Transformative learning and youth empowerment in a changing climate

Elem Sci Anth ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Bentz ◽  
Karen O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Young People ◽  
Transformative Learning ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
Instrumental Learning ◽  
Changing Climate ◽  
Climate Change Responses ◽  
Opening Up

Young people represent a powerful force for social change, and they have an important role to play in climate change responses. However, empowering young people to be “systems changers” is not straightforward. It is particularly challenging within educational systems that prioritize instrumental learning over critical thinking and creative actions. History has shown that by creating novel spaces for reflexivity and experimentation, the arts have played a role in shifting mindsets and opening up new political horizons. In this paper, we explore the role of art as a driver for societal transformation in a changing climate and consider how an experiment with change can facilitate reflection on relationships between individual change and systems change. Following a review of the literature on transformations, transformative learning and the role of art, we describe an experiment with change carried out with students at an Art High School in Lisbon, Portugal, which involved choosing one sustainable behavior and adopting it for 30 days. A transformative program encouraged regular reflection and group discussions. During the experiment, students started developing an art project about his or her experience with change. The results show that a transformative learning approach that engages students with art can support critical thinking and climate change awareness, new perspectives and a sense of empowerment. Experiential, arts-based approaches also have the potential to create direct and indirect effects beyond the involved participants. We conclude that climate-related art projects can serve as more than a form of science communication. They represent a process of opening up imaginative spaces where audiences can move more freely and reconsider the role of humans as responsible beings with agency and a stake in sustainability transformations.

Science communication and mediatised environmental conflict: A cautionary tale

2021 ◽  
pp. 096366252098513
Author(s):  
Claire Konkes ◽  
Kerrie Foxwell-Norton
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
Climate Science ◽  
Environmental Conflict ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
James Cook ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
Tenured Position

When Australian physicist, Peter Ridd, lost his tenured position with James Cook University, he was called a ‘whistleblower’, ‘contrarian academic’ and ‘hero of climate science denial’. In this article, we examine the events surrounding his dismissal to better understand the role of science communication in organised climate change scepticism. We discuss the sophistry of his complaint to locate where and through what processes science communication becomes political communication. We argue that the prominence of scientists and scientific knowledge in debates about climate change locates science, as a social sphere or fifth pillar in Hutchins and Lester’s theory of mediatised environmental conflict. In doing so, we provide a model to better understand how science communication can be deployed during politicised debates.

scholarly journals Resource for teachers on the "Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lydie Lescarmontier ◽  
Eric Guilyardi ◽  
Simon Klein ◽  
Djian Sadadou ◽  
Mathilde Tricoire ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Educational Resources ◽  
Lower Secondary School ◽  
Special Report ◽  
Climate Change Education ◽  
Reasoning Abilities ◽  
Changing Climate ◽  
Teacher Handbook ◽  
Selection Of

<div> <div> <div> <p>The essential role of education in addressing the causes and consequences of anthropogenic climate change is increasingly being recognised at an international level. The Office for Climate Education (OCE) develops educational resources and proposes professional development opportunities to support teachers, worldwide, to mainstream climate change education. Drawing upon the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, the OCE has produced a set of educational resources that cover the scientific and societal dimensions, at local and global levels, while developing students’ reasoning abilities and guiding them to take action (mitigation and/or adaptation) in their schools or communities. These resources include:</p> <p>1. Ready-to-use teacher handbook that (i) target students from the last years of primary school to the end of lower-secondary school (aged 9 to 15), (ii) include scientific and pedagogical overviews, lesson plans, activities and worksheets, (iii) are interdisciplinary, covering topics in the natural sciences, social sciences, arts and physical education, (iv) promote active pedagogies: inquiry- based science education, role-play, debate, projectbased learning.</p> <p>2. A Summary for teachers of the IPCC Special Report, presented together with a selection of related activities and exercises that can be implemented in the classroom.</p> <p>3. A set of 10 videos where experts speak about a specific issue related to the ocean or the cryosphere, in the context of climate change.</p> <p>4. A set of 4 multimedia activities offering students the possibility of working interactively in different topics related to climate change.</p> <p>5. A set of 3 resources for teacher trainers, offering turnkey training protocols on the topics of climate change, ocean and cryosphere.</p> </div> </div> </div>

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 149-158
Author(s):  
Jade S. Sasser
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Young People ◽  
Global South ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Youth Population ◽  
Sub Saharan

The concluding chapter turns to the questions and observations that initially motivated this project: the role of women in sub-Saharan Africa, whom population advocates claim to represent. It raises questions about the links between contemporary investment in global South girls, instrumental gender and climate change solutions, and sexual stewardship, demonstrating how development-led concepts of women’s agency elide the contexts of their everyday lives. It concludes, not by offering solutions, but by fretting over the role of youth population advocacy, the politics and possibilities of their engagements with this work, raising questions about whether and how young people can transform populationist ideas into something closer to the social justice they seek.

Using evolutionary functional-structural plant modelling to understand the effect of climate change on plant populations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorad de Vries
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Functional Traits ◽  
Plant Communities ◽  
Evolutionary Dynamics ◽  
Biotic Interactions ◽  
Plant Fitness ◽  
Vital Rates ◽  
Climate Change Responses ◽  
Mechanistic Basis

The “holy grail” of trait-based ecology is to predict the fitness of a species in a particular environment based on its functional traits, which has become all the more relevant in the light of global change. However, current ecological models are ill-equipped to predict ecological responses to novel conditions due to their reliance on statistical methods and current observations rather than the mechanisms underlying how functional traits interact with the environment to determine plant fitness. Here, I will advocate the use of functional-structural plant (FSP) modelling in combination with evolutionary modelling to explore climate change responses in natural plant communities. Gaining a mechanistic understanding of how trait-environment interactions drive natural selection in novel environments requires consideration of individual plants with multidimensional phenotypes in dynamic environments that include abiotic gradients and biotic interactions, and their effect on the different vital rates that determine plant fitness. Evolutionary FSP modelling explicitly represents the trait-environment interactions that drive eco-evolutionary dynamics from individual to population scales and allows for efficient navigation of the large, complex and dynamic fitness landscapes that emerge from considering multidimensional plants in multidimensional environments. Using evolutionary FSP modelling as a tool to study climate change responses of plant communities can further our understanding of the mechanistic basis of these responses, and in particular, the role of local adaptation, phenotypic plasticity, and gene flow.

scholarly journals Adaptation to climate change through genetic accommodation and assimilation of plastic phenotypes

2019 ◽  
Vol 374 (1768) ◽  
pp. 20180176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural Populations ◽  
Adaptive Responses ◽  
Adaptation To Climate Change ◽  
Genetic Accommodation ◽  
Direct Observations ◽  
Climate Change Responses ◽  
Evolutionary Changes ◽  
Environmentally Responsive

Theory suggests that evolutionary changes in phenotypic plasticity could either hinder or facilitate evolutionary rescue in a changing climate. Nevertheless, the actual role of evolving plasticity in the responses of natural populations to climate change remains unresolved. Direct observations of evolutionary change in nature are rare, making it difficult to assess the relative contributions of changes in trait means versus changes in plasticity to climate change responses. To address this gap, this review explores several proxies that can be used to understand evolving plasticity in the context of climate change, including space for time substitutions, experimental evolution and tests for genomic divergence at environmentally responsive loci. Comparisons among populations indicate a prominent role for divergence in environmentally responsive traits in local adaptation to climatic gradients. Moreover, genomic comparisons among such populations have identified pervasive divergence in the regulatory regions of environmentally responsive loci. Taken together, these lines of evidence suggest that divergence in plasticity plays a prominent role in adaptation to climatic gradients over space, indicating that evolving plasticity is also likely to play a key role in adaptive responses to climate change through time. This suggests that genetic variation in plastic responses to the environment (G × E) might be an important predictor of species' vulnerabilities to climate-driven decline or extinction.This article is part of the theme issue ‘The role of plasticity in phenotypic adaptation to rapid environmental change’.

scholarly journals Communicating climate change in a “post-factual” society: lessons learned from the Pole to Paris campaign

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-93
Author(s):  
Erlend M. Knudsen ◽  
Oria J. de Bolsée
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Polar Regions ◽  
Awareness Campaign ◽  
Climate Change Science ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
The Impact

Abstract. The politicization of and societal debate on climate change science have increased over the last decades. Here, the authors argue that the role of climate scientists in our society needs to adapt in accordance with this development. We share our experiences from the awareness campaign Pole to Paris, which engaged non-academic audiences on climate change issues on the roads from the polar regions to Paris and through conventional and social media. By running and cycling across a third of the globe, the scientists behind the initiative established connections on the audiences' terms. Propitiously for other outreach efforts, the exertions were not in themselves the most attractive; among our social media followers, the messages of climate change science and action were more favourable, as measured by video statistics and a follower survey. Communicating climate action in itself challenges our positions as scientists, and here we discuss the impact such messages have on our credibility as researchers. Based on these reflections, as well as those from other science communication initiatives, we suggest a way forward for climate scientists in the post-factual society, who should be better trained in interaction with non-academic audiences and pseudoscepticism.

scholarly journals Youth-led climate strikes: fresh opportunities and enduring challenges for youth research - commentary to Bowman

2020 ◽  
Vol 198 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Bronwyn Wood
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Young People ◽  
Political Participation ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Behavioural Change ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Youth Research ◽  
Political Agent

In this commentary I respond to Benjamin Bowman’s Fennia paper by extending upon his central thesis that argues that the prevailing methodological tools and framings used to research youth political participation perpetuate unhelpful and inadequate dichotomies about youth. Advancing upon this, I suggest that the youth climate strikes in 2019 highlight three prevalent discourses in youth research relating to climate change: (i) the tendency to view youth as isolated individuals, neglecting the role of adults and communities; (ii) the tendency to focus on individual behavioural change rather than recognise the need for systemic and societal responses to climate change, and (iii) the tendency to overlook structural characteristics of youth such as race, gender and social class. The resulting discourses of youth autonomy, individualism and homogeneity lead to a distorted picture of young activists and perpetuate harmful narratives which lead to stigma, despair and cynicism. The paper concludes by advocating for greater care in the research methodologies and critical frameworks we use to report on youth at public events, such as climate strikes, in order to allow for the complexity of the young political agent, the ambiguity of some of their actions and for opportunities that enable young people themselves to articulate their own participation.

scholarly journals Analysis of materials in virtual media space as a method for forming critical thinking of internet users

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-194
Author(s):  
Natalya Galkina
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Young People ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Resources ◽  
Internet Users ◽  
Media Space ◽  
Teacher Students ◽  
Points Of View

The relevance of this paper is due to the fact that in conditions of an overabundance of diverse information, there is a problem of its adequate perception. New forms of communication – the Internet and social networks – give not only new opportunities for communication and expression of the opinion, but they also create many vulnerabilities, ways of manipulating public opinion and consciousness. These questions are especially relevant for educators working with young people, whose worldview is in the process of formation, whose opinions, points of view are unstable, are influenced from outside, and mainly from Internet resources. The purpose of this article is to analyze and summarize the experience of working with students in the context of the development of critical thinking by the example of the study of comments on video messages on the YouTube channel. The description of the practical stages of the teacher-students interaction is given in accordance with the technology of teaching critical thinking. The role of the teacher and students in this process is determined. It is shown that the materials uploaded on popular Internet resources can and should be used not only for a purely practical, objective purpose, but also at a general educational, developing, worldview level, with the goal of forming critical thinking of Internet users.

scholarly journals Postglacial migration across a large dispersal barrier outpaces regional expansion from glacial refugia: evidence from two conifers in the Pacific Northwest

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
MC Fernandez ◽  
FS Hu ◽  
DG Gavin ◽  
G deLafontaine ◽  
KD Heath
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Glacial Refugia ◽  
Conifer Species ◽  
Changing Climate ◽  
Modern Species ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Postglacial Migration ◽  
The Impact

AbstractUnderstanding how climate refugia and migration over great distances have facilitated species survival during periods of past climate change is crucial for evaluating contemporary threats to biodiversity. In addition to tracking a changing climate, extant species must face complex, anthropogenically fragmented landscapes. The dominant conifer species in the mesic temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest are split by the arid rain-shadow of the Cascade Range into coastal and interior distributions, with continued debate over the origins of the interior populations. If the Last Glacial Maximum extirpated populations in the interior then postglacial migration across the arid divide would have been necessary to create the current distribution, whereas interior refugial persistence could have locally repopulated the disjunction. These alternative scenarios have significant implications for the postglacial development of the Pacific Northwest mesic forests and the impact of dispersal barriers during periods of climate change. Here we use genotyping-by-sequencing (ddRADseq) and phylogeographical modeling to show that the postglacial expansion of both mountain hemlock and western redcedar consisted largely of long-distance spread inland in the direction of dominant winds, with limited expansion from an interior redcedar refugium. Our results for these two key mesic conifers, along with fossil pollen data, address the longstanding question on the development of the Pacific Northwest mesic forests and contrast with many recent studies emphasizing the role of cryptic refugia in colonizing modern species ranges.Statement of SignificanceUnderstanding whether habitat fragmentation hinders range shifts as species track a changing climate presents a pressing challenge for biologists. Species with disjunct distributions provide a natural laboratory for studying the effects of fragmentation during past periods of climate change. We find that dispersal across a 50-200-km inhospitable barrier characterized the expansion of two conifer species since the last ice age. The importance of migration, and minimal contribution of more local glacial refugia, contrasts with many recent studies emphasizing the role of microrefugia in populating modern species distributions. Our results address a longstanding question on the development of the disjunct mesic conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest and offer new insights into the spatiotemporal patterns of refugial populations and postglacial vegetation development previously unresolved despite decades of paleoecological studies.

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