Taking the climate initiative
For Greg Klerkx, addressing climate anxiety is as important as decarbonising. Without one, we will not get the other.
Student feelings about climate change
In December 2021, a team of researchers from the UK, USA, and Finland released the results of a sweeping survey of children and young people focused on their feelings about climate change. This survey, the largest-ever of its kind, involved 10,000 participants in 10 countries spanning all populated continents and covering a wide range of socioeconomic and living circumstances.
The results were remarkably uniform. More than half of all children and young people surveyed were ‘very or extremely worried’ about climate change, with 84% at least moderately worried. Most felt ‘sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty’ and said that such emotions ‘negatively affected their daily life.’
‘Daily life’, of course, includes school, where, for the most part, climate education begins and ends with facts and information: what is happening, why it is happening, what solutions are possible. None of this is wrong. But as an approach to engaging children and young people about climate change – and galvanising effective ways of teaching and learning about this critical subject – it may be incomplete.
Teacher concerns
My organisation, Climate Shift, was founded to help bridge the gap between what we feel about climate change and what we do with this in our lives. It was built on my immersion in the growing field of climate psychology and my work with schools worldwide to help educators revitalise and reconnect with their innate creativity, which so many have told me can get lost amidst the many pressures educators and schools face on a daily basis.
In recent years, educators have told me more frequently they don’t have space or practice to explore their own feelings about climate change, even as they are inundated by news about floods, fires, droughts, and more. At the same time, they’re expressing growing concern that climate education, whatever its form, isn’t addressing students’ anxieties about the warming world they are inheriting, which in turn affects how they learn in general. The connection between these challenges is beginning to show up in research, as in this recent survey of American middle school teachers revealing that a majority of both teachers and students surveyed were experiencing some form of climate anxiety – and that the teachers felt ill-equipped to deal with it in their classrooms.
Creative response
Reflecting on this context has resulted in a new programme ‘Love and Fear in a Warming World’ developed in collaboration with Jigyasa Labroo, co-founder of the award-winning Indian youth arts charity, Slam Out Loud. Our collaboration grew from two shared beliefs: that creative activities could unlock deeper, more meaningful insights into climate change and that such insights were most powerful as shared experiences, whether as groups of educators, parents, students, or even people living in the same city or community. Love and Fear sessions have happened live in the UK, Europe and India, and online with participants worldwide.
Participating in these sessions requires no specific knowledge about climate change. We work with whatever information participants already have, weaving connections between what we feel about climate change, the values we aim to live by, and what we love and cherish about the world we live in.
Our exploration happens through a variety of easily replicable creative activities that help to unlock deeper and more meaningful conversations about a topic that can easily feel overwhelming to adults and young people alike. We finish by discussing how we might bring this practice into our classrooms and schools to create richer, deeper connections to climate education and learning.
Just bring yourself
You don’t need to prepare anything for these sessions – just bring yourself as a human and as an educator. There are no decks or handouts, though there is strongly scaffolded in-session guidance and post-session support. By removing external media from the session, we aim to draw the focus more closely to ourselves and each other, aiming to discover new ways to engage with climate change as adults and for the young people whose futures we are helping to shape.
For more than two decades Greg Klerkx has designed and delivered programmes at the intersection of the arts and learning for clients including the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Royal Opera House, Tate, the Tavistock Institute for Human Relations, and for schools and education systems in the UK, USA, Europe, and Asia.
He is speaking at the 43rd COBIS Annual Conference, taking place in London, on May 10th – 12th. Click on the link to book your place now!
FEATURE IMAGE: by Matt Palmer on Unsplash
Support Images: Ahmer Kalam ahmerkalam on Unsplash and Leonardo Basso on Unsplash
