Volume 25, Number 3, 2025 Action Research for Eco-Justice and Climate Action (Part 2) Guest-edited by Blane Harvey

EN:

Climate change education poses significant challenges for K-12 teachers in northern British Columbia (B.C.) due to the complexity of the challenges of climate change and limited support for integration into teaching practice. In response to the 2022 Accord on Education for a Sustainable Future, the Climate Education in Teacher Education (CETE) project was initiated at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC). CETE aims to address an urgent need to respond to the changing climate of northern B.C., where warming is occurring 2-3 times faster than in southern B.C., by equipping teachers with practical and tailored approaches and supports. Using the methodology of Education Design-Based Research, CETE employs the conjecture mapping method to develop educational interventions and refine trajectories to be responsive to local realities. Over three years (2022-2025), CETE has engaged in strategic collaborations with climate change education experts, resulting in the generation of seven high level conjectures that guide research and action. This paper examines patterns around roles of community cooperation and iterative design, through action research aimed towards empowering northern B.C. teachers and researchers to respond climate change education demands by considering agency, creative pedagogy, educational leadership, and climate change adaptation, in hopeful and intentional ways.

EN:

This paper documents the action research process at a secondary school in Québec, Canada. Our goal was to rethink sayings, doings, and relatings towards transformative climate change education (TCCE). For schools to play a role in climate action, climate change education must move beyond information-based learning approaches, yet how to practice more transformative approaches remains a question. To pursue this question, this study focuses on action research as a methodology for intervening in different layers of school systems to promote TCCE. This paper applies the theory of practice architectures as an analytical lens to identify the enablers and constraints for holistic change. The study surfaced a complex web of interconnections between individual teacher practices and institutional structures, illuminated challenges of teacher-led school transformation, and demonstrated the promise of participatory action research as a methodology for moving schools towards TCCE.

EN:

This participatory action research project used photovoice to explore how adolescents perceive and communicate about the natural world. Members of a high school social justice club took photographs of nature and wrote artist statements to convey their intended messages. They highlighted the beauty and complexity of nature, aiming to inspire appreciation in their audience. Drawing on a participatory paradigm and from concepts of ecopedagogy and self-efficacy, the project underscores the importance of allowing students to experience and express emotions, even negative ones, to challenge the status quo and foster active participation in climate action. The article concludes with recommendations for educators to empower youth in eco-justice efforts.

EN:

This study explores how architecture can support climate change education and examines how children develop climate action concepts through design. In response to increased eco-anxiety among children due to climate change, the research explores how and if architecture can empower students as future designers. The study was conducted as a five-week action research project in collaboration with a local public school and the participation of two fourth grade classes. The study involved children participating in an architecture program adjusted to their existing ministry-approved curriculum, and enriched by two exhibitions, one at their school for their school community and families and another one at a university. Findings highlight the versatility of architecture as a cross-curricular subject and the importance of using design education to foster empathy, agency, and a sense of responsibility in addressing climate change.

EN:

Spending time on the land and the water to connect and share with one another is central to the grounded lived experiences of many diverse Indigenous communities, yet these activities still tend to be optional or even excluded in traditional research. Grounded in conversation, which uplifts Indigenous oral traditional methods, this article reflects on the power of learning and sharing on the land and water, through arts-based and embodied methods. Using collective coding, the paper reflects specifically on activities led as part of a three-year project, ‘Carving out Climate Testimony’, wherein Inuvialuit youth, Coast Salish Indigenous communities and academics came together to explore the complex lived experiences of climate change. We highlight the pedagogical and personal transformations and benefits of land-based learning and the importance of Indigenous mobilities in fostering climate and cultural awareness and action.

EN:

The disconnection between humans and their surrounding ecologies, intensified since the industrial revolution and often described as the “metabolic rift,” has profoundly influenced dominant research practices as enterprises of knowledge production. As such, much research today, including climate change research, is disconnected from the land and the communities who depend on and steward it. This paper starts by briefly tracing a response to this disconnection, the emergence of community-engaged approaches to action research. Turning on the urgency of community adaptation under the climate emergency, we point to how this trajectory has seeded a paradigm shift to what we are referring to as community-directed research (C-DAR). Drawing on dialogues with three Indigenous community partners in Brazil—the Tremembé, Mundurukú, and Guaraní—we theorize how C-DAR could navigate four critical boundaries to bridge the rift between researchers and the land: The rift between western science and Indigenous and local knowledges; the rift between natural and social sciences; the rift between institutional (university) and community contexts; and the rift between the Global South and the Global North. We conclude with an observation that the acronym “C-DAR” is phonetically identical in Brazil to the Portuguese reflexive verb “se dar” which can mean “to give oneself to something.” In this spirit of “se dar,” we offer our paper as a call for experiments in reparative approaches to research, inviting scholars to reflect on their willingness to engage with this ethos.

EN:

Stories move people, and storytelling constitutes an important form of local action in the face of the multiple crises we confront at this time. Community-led podcasting is a powerful medium for conveying these stories, disrupting mass media’s dominant narrative to reframe discourse and amplify local perspectives on social and ecological issues. The Storytelling Initiative worked with frontline communities and organizations confronting climate and environmental crises to not just be subjects of podcasts, but authors and producers of their own stories. Each podcast shares a unique story of collective learning and action, ranging from youth in informal settlements building leadership to contend with climate impacts in their communities, to the use of legal mechanisms by communities in Pakistan to halt destructive government-sponsored development projects, to voices from the Arctic bringing gender relations into discussions of climate in the region. This article shares the community participatory podcasting approach used to work with the seven podcasting teams that produced these stories, and the community of practice that emerged as a result. It unpacks ways in which the stories they share push for wider change from the standpoint of their respective struggles, and invites listeners to learn with them. It also reflects on the potential of participatory podcast production and analysis as an emergent method of participatory action research.

EN:

Climate action research can be an emotionally and intellectually challenging space, given the magnitude of the climate crisis, the slow pace of progress, the existential weight of environmental degradation and isolation that results when researchers work and write alone. But action research for climate justice can also be an endeavour of hopefulness and vibrancy, wherein community connections and co-developed climate research data can forge meaningful changes for long term emotional and ecological sustainability. In this article, we examine the seven principles of critical hope (Redacted by Managing Editor, 2022) as a framework for identifying climate action research projects that exemplify critical hope. We draw on examples from both inside and outside the academy to explore how climate action research projects contribute to the communication and cultivation of critical climate hope.