Abstract:
The uneven ways in which climate change is taught (or not) within schools, and the uneven experiences of students in relation to transformative climate justice education, is a matter of curricular justice. Previous research has demonstrated how schools can steer students’ environmental concerns within school, in extra-curricular spaces, and in responses to their activism outside of school, away from explicitly ‘political’ questions. Recent systematic reviews of the Climate Change Education literature note a depoliticising tendency in climate change education, with official curriculum documents rarely engaging with issues of justice. In para- and extra-curricular groups in schools, students can be encouraged to adopt a ‘soft’ reform approach to environmental advocacy in schools: reform through awareness-raising and/ or individualising the problems and solutions. This previous research raises questions of how young people who have been involved in post-2018 climate advocacy might narrate and make sense of their experiences of learning about climate change and their shools’ responses to their activism, and where and how they have learned about ‘climate justice’. Based on participatory and ethnographic research with 60 young people involved in climate justice activist networks across Australia, this paper will explore young people’s stories of learning (or not) about climate change and climate justice within mainstream schooling, and in social movement spaces. These young activists’ accounts of learning within and beyond school suggest that mainstream schooling has much to learn from the climate justice pedagogies at work in social movement spaces about the relationship between climate justice and curriculum justice.