Global Climate Education and Its Discontents

This innovative and practical book offers pedagogical tools to show how drama can be used in educational settings to advance a relational, action-oriented, interdisciplinary, and creative climate education attuned to the social and emotional effects of the climate emergency. Based on a six-year ethnographic research study taking place with teachers, artists, community leaders, and young people globally, and taking its lead from the following provocation ? can performance become a site for new imaginaries for socio-ecological justice? ? the book explores the unique conceptual and pedagogical ?discontents? of climate education across geographically and culturally distinct sites of learning. It also examines how artful engagement through drama pedagogies can open up more collective, critical, and hopeful forms of thinking and being.

The book is divided into two sections. The first part of the book, Local engagements and encounters, consists of chapters that conduct an in-depth appraisal of the local artistic work from each site, examining how matters of socio-ecological justice are given fresh urgency and complexity through the application of performance as pedagogy. The second part of the book, Pedagogical and artistic innovations, offers substantive praxis chapters on the drama-based pedagogical methods employed in the research. In these chapters, the world-building capacities of theatre-making offer up new, performative pedagogical orientations to the climate emergency beyond those of critique.

Global Climate Education and Its Discontents: Using Drama to Forge a New Way is valuable reading for scholars interested in the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the climate emergency, especially within and across the following fields: drama, theatre and performance studies, applied theatre and drama education, educational research, and children/childhood and youth studies. The book also invites a readership of teachers and teacher-educators who are interested in applying drama pedagogies in the classroom to explore matters of socio-ecological justice and the climate crisis.

"Global Climate Education and its Discontents is a necessarily audacious response to the high-stakes challenge of how to live and educate amidst multiple, complex ecological crises. Through richly described and theorised practice, each chapter shows how drama is more than a tool in the environmental education toolbox. Rather, collaborative theatre and performance by and with youth are powerful ecopedagogies that activate other ways of knowing and, potentially, other climate futures. I?ve long been waiting for a book like this and have already started setting chapters as readings for my courses." -- Molly Mullen, Waipapa Taumata Rau ? University of Auckland, New Zealand

"This rich book could not have arrived at a better time, offering trajectories of hope in difficult times. Writing in a context ? the UK ? where the arts are routinely disparaged and devalued, the centring of drama as a vital and meaningful way to practice socio-ecological pedagogy offers me something of a lifeline, powerfully reminding me of just what drama is capable of. Built on foundations of multi-generational and transnational research spanning many years, this research ensemble ethically centres the experiences, insights, feelings and dreams of young people. Conceptual gifts which I now carry close include found pedagogy, esperanza ambiental, eco-gladness, theatre publicing, and glocalised critical sensory pedagogy." -- Professor Dee Heddon, James Arnott Chair in Drama, University of Glasgow, UK

"This book is of exceptional importance at a time of global crisis. It uses the concept of ?discontent? with climate education as a wake-up call for active and collective engagement with environmental emergencies in local and global contexts. Three forms of dramatic performative tools ? Verbatim Theatre, Devising, and Site-Specific Theatre ? are utilized to generate a collective understanding of the healing, care, and recovery of the earth?s ecosystems. The unique and passionately argued chapters come together in interrelated arguments that are connected in their search for ecological recovery as it emerges in an ensemble of different knowledge systems." -- Urmimala Sarkar Munsi, Professor and Dean, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India