Description
This research will produce more nuanced understandings of how hope is collectively curated for, with, and by teachers and students in response to climate related issues, illustrating how hoping for better worlds must acknowledge despair, trauma, tension, trouble, and suffering. Through ethnography, it inquires into how educators kindle hope with students as they think about, learn with, and engage collectively in climate-related issues. Rather than reproducing a hope/despair binary, this research wonders how teachers invite students to potentially co-create pathways to hope amid climate and ecological anxiety, fear, trauma, loss, and grief; to open up new ways of thinking about hope/despair and care in climate change education. With curiosity about language/terminology, stories, resources, curricula, and learning activity choices, this research invites thoughtfulness about how teachers provoke students to foster collective hopefulness possibilities.
Primary Investigator
Audrey Aamodt
Co-Investigators
None
Funding Competition
Funding Awarded
$ 12,068.00
Investigator Bio
Dr. Aamodt’s research intersects the areas of Treaty Education, Social Studies Education, and Science and Environmental Education in the Anthropocene. Currently her research interests focus on climate emotions; specifically how active and honest hopefulness is engaged by teachers as an emotional and pedagogical response to climate change, while acknowledging and tending to varied emotional experiences related to ecological crises (i.e. anxiety, loss, grief, trauma, anger, guilt, paralysis, solastalgia, etc.). She is particularly concerned with the ways that students may be positioned as responsible for saving the world and seeks to interrogate how such problematic narratives are reproduced by various pedagogical attempts at eliciting hope in response to continued ecological destruction.
Academic Qualifications:
• Doctor of Philosophy (2020) – Curriculum & Instruction, University of Regina
• Master of Arts (2010) – Environmental Education & Communication, Royal Roads University
• Bachelor of Education (2003) – University of Regina
• Master of Arts (2010) – Environmental Education & Communication, Royal Roads University
• Bachelor of Education (2003) – University of Regina
