Towards an understanding of how school climate strikes work as public pedagogy
ISSN: 1443-9883
Article publication date: 29 November 2023
Issue publication date: 29 January 2024
Abstract
Purpose
School climate strikes are opening spaces of appearance, becoming differently active forms of public pedagogy where new and previously unthought collective climate action is possible. This inquiry contributes to understanding school climate strikes as important forms of climate justice activism by exploring how they work as public pedagogy.
Design/methodology/approach
The inquiry process involved poetic inquiry to produce an affective poetic witness statement to an event of school climate strikes, and then a performative enactment of diffractive reading using the poem created. The diffractive reading is used to conceptualise school climate strikes as public pedagogy and move towards an understanding of how school climate strikes work as public pedagogy. Diffused throughout is the question of where the more-than-human fits in public pedagogy and youth climate justice activism.
Findings
School climate strikes are dynamic and differently acting (diffracting) public pedagogies that work by open spaces of appearance that enable capacities for collective action in heterogeneous political spaces. Consideration of entanglements and intra-actions between learner, place, knowledge and climate change are productive in understanding how phenomena work as public pedagogy.
Originality/value
This inquiry extends on important considerations in both climate change education and public pedagogy scholarship. It diffuses consideration of the more-than-human throughout the inquiry and enacts a move beyond the humanist limits of existing public pedagogy scholarship by introducing climate intra-action, heterogeneous political spaces and non-conforming learning to an understanding of activist public pedagogies and the educative agent.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges Wurrundjeri Country as the unceded Indigenous land on which this work was produced and offers her respect to Elders and ancestors across time. The author thanks her colleagues from the Climate Change Education Network (climatechangeeducation.net.au) who provided early encouragement to progress her thinking with One Day In September about how school climate strikes can be considered public pedagogy. The author thanks her PhD supervisors and the peer reviewers who provided generous feedback on earlier versions of this article.
Citation
Sutton, B.A. (2024), "Towards an understanding of how school climate strikes work as public pedagogy", Qualitative Research Journal, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 65-79. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-04-2023-0059
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023, Emerald Publishing Limited