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Campbell2023 What Do We

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Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, 57, 457–477

https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhad020
Advance access publication 22 March 2023
Original Article

‘What do we talk about when we talk about

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climate change?’: meaningful environmental
education, beyond the info dump
Cary Campbell
Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University, Education Building, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby,
Vancouver, BC V5A 1S6, Canada
Corresponding author. 1870 Charles St., Vancouver, BC V5L 2T7, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT
Learning about the causes and effects of human-induced climate change is an essential aspect of
contemporary environmental education (EE). However, it is increasingly recognized that the
familiar ‘information dump delivery mode’ (as Timothy Morton calls it), through which new
facts about ecological destruction are being constantly communicated, often contributes to
anxiety, cognitive exhaustion, and can ultimately lead to hopelessness and paralysis in the face
of ecological issues. In this article, I explore several pathways to approach EE, beyond the
presentation and transmission of ecological facts. I position my conceptual discussion around
my own teaching experiences speaking about climate change with undergraduate students
across several Education classes through 2019 to 2021. I situate these reflections within the
current discourse on education and teaching in/for the Anthropocene. Throughout this
discussion, I locate various ways in which much EE fails to contribute to student’s agency and
empowerment by consistently reducing complex ecological phenomena to a set of problems,
mainly economic/technological, to be fixed by technocracy. I propose that a contemplative–
existential perspective to EE is capable of responding to these reductions, most basically by
providing opportunities and practices for students to process their grief and other emotions
through recognizing the Anthropocene as an inescapable reality, but also a reality that cannot
be determinately imagined or predicted.

KEYWORDS: eco-anxiety, environmental education, Anthropocene education, teacher self-


study, post-humanism, eco-pedagogy, ecological virtue ethics

‘[K]nowing the right thing does not necessarily translate into living the right way.’ (Bai et al.
2020: xii)

Received: April 13, 2022. Revised: August 26, 2022. Accepted: March 11, 2023
© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Philosophy of Education Society of Great
Britain. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
458 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2

INTRODUCTION
Learning about the causes and effects of human-induced climate change (HICC) is
an essential aspect of contemporary environmental education (EE). However, it is
increasingly recognized that the familiar ‘information dump delivery mode’
(Morton 2018) through which new data and facts about ecological destruction

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are constantly communicated contributes to anxiety, cognitive exhaustion, and
can ultimately lead to hopelessness and paralysis in the face of ecological issues
(Ojala 2016; Stanger 2016; Verlie 2019; Clayton 2020; Pihkala 2020).
In this article, I explore several pathways to approach climate change curriculum
and pedagogy existentially and philosophically, beyond the communication and pres­
entation of facts/data.1 I centre my review of the scholarly discussion within EE and
educational philosophy around short reflections on my own teaching experiences
speaking with undergraduate students about climate change, across several
Education classes, specifically between September 2019 and December 2020.
Dialoguing about climate change has become a central aspect of my pedagogical
work with undergraduate students over the last five years. I should stress that, much
of the time, these conversations have been unplanned and emergent—spilling over
from the official curriculum. Primarily, these dialogues have been spurred on by our
recent shared experiences with intense fires and wildfire smoke—a regular occur­
rence in the Pacific Northwest (of North America) since 2017. Due to the imme­
diacy of these extreme weather events, it is often the case that we simply cannot not
speak about these issues.2
To guide this philosophical discussion and review, I present three themes that
have frequently emerged in my discussions with students that I convey as existential
inquiry questions: ‘what’s happening?’, ‘why me?’, and ‘what now?’.
These questions present the kind of curricular journey, or unfurling, that these
conversations often take. More fully this consists of: first acknowledging the reality
of life in the Anthropocene (‘what’s happening?’) and the various ways we had been
affected and influenced by this reality (‘why me?’); moving on to critique the very
thinking/doing responsible for the Anthropocene—those implicit and explicit hu­
manist frameworks that consistently diminish or reduce the non-human in a variety
of ways; to, finally, address the kinds of ecological values and virtues that might en­
able us to live well and meaningfully (and maybe even flourish?) through an era of
widespread climate crisis and ecological precarity (‘what now?’).

1
For this foundational distinction of ‘matters of fact’ from ‘matters of value’ and ‘matters of concern’
in social theory/critique, see Latour (2004); for discussion in the context of EE, see Gleason (2019).
2
To provide a brief overview of how this continuing project of hosting ‘climate change discussion
groups’ came to be, in autumn 2019 and spring 2020, while I was working as a teaching assistant for
the large undergraduate class, ‘Introduction to Philosophy of Education’, a group of about eight to twelve
students from five separate tutorial blocks (seventy-five students total), decided to meet with me, semi-
regularly outside of class so we could continue discussing recurrent ‘climate change’ themed conversa­
tions from tutorials. Participation in these group dialogues was extra-curricular, and completely informal
and optional. This initial class, was, in many ways, the catalyst for this article and study.
C. Campbell • 459

Throughout this discussion, I address several ways in which much contemporary


EE and sustainability education discourse fails to contribute to students’ agency and
empowerment in the face of ecological issues, by consistently reducing complex eco­
logical phenomena (notably, tied to many different timescales, temporalities and
visions of progress) to a set of problems, mainly economic/technological, to be
fixed by technocracy (see Greenwood 2014; Hern et al. 2018; Bringhurst and

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Zwicky 2018; Stables 2019a; Bai 2020; Jandrić and Ford 2022).
As this theoretical discussion is guided by self-study from my own teaching prac­
tice, I focus, most specifically, on the role and task of the teacher in dialoguing
through the Anthropocene, in the hope of opening up pathways to foster and inspire
teaching artistry (see Eisner 2002; Biesta 2017) in confronting this difficult task. I
propose that a contemplative–existential perspective on education in the
Anthropocene is capable of responding to these technocratic reductions (see Bai
et al. 2013, 2020, 2021; Wapner 2016; Pulkki et al. 2017; Wamsler 2019). It
does this most basically by providing opportunities for students to process their
own grief and other emotions through recognizing the Anthropocene as an inescap­
able reality, but also a reality that cannot be determinately predicted nor imagined.
Thus, I observe that this work of dialoguing through—specifically its open-ended,
improvisational, decentralized, emergent, and messy nature—is resonant with the
work of arts educators (see Campbell 2018a; Sikkema et al. 2021; Dahn et al.
2022) and growing (often arts-based or arts-informed) eco-pedagogy movements
(Kahn 2010; Affifi and Christie 2018; Jandrić and Ford 2022; Walsh and Tait
2019; Stickney and Skilbeck 2020; Haley 2021; Morse et al. 2021).
I stress that this article is a conceptual and theoretical review of recent education­
al and environmental/post-humanist theory exploring openings for pedagogy. That
is to say that, although guided by practitioner study (e.g. Roche 2011), this is not
specifically a presentation on my teaching practice, or action research. Thus, al­
though I overlay quotes and observations from my students in this article, I am care­
ful not to present this as substantiation for or against the commentaries discussed in
this article.3 Rather, the voices of these young (mainly first- and second-year
students) are woven into the text, to provide a personalized grounding for the
higher-level philosophical discussion on the possibilities and challenges of enacting
meaningful and transformative climate change education in the era of the
Anthropocene (see Gough and Stables 2012; Stickney and Skilbeck 2020). Thus,
I should stress I am not in this article inquiring into the context of these students’
3
Despite the informal origins of these dialogues, I did make use of several research methods and
strategies to better understand what I was noticing and hearing from students in these dialogue sessions.
Most notes and quotes were adapted from in-class field notes, and teacher summaries after each class and
session, that I had been taking throughout the discussions, although two of these sessions (approximately
forty-five minutes to an hour in length each) were recorded, transcribed (with permission from students).
These fieldnotes and recordings were flexibly coded for emergent themes and categories, using a
(grounded) qualitative approach, loosely adapted from the framework of Interpretative
Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). IPA seemed to be an appropriate choice for working with groups
of this size (a range of eight to twelve students) as well as for its overt focus on how people make meaning
in specific contexts (see Smith and Osborn 2003).
460 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2

specific positionalities—and for ethical reasons, all distinguishing features of these


students have been removed. Still, I feel this personalized orientation to the article is
important as it is these students’ concerns that drove me to ponder these questions
seriously in my own life and teaching, and furthermore, because it is the students’
future that needs to be a constant and principal consideration in these scholarly
conversations.

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THE IMPETUS FOR DIALOGUE
Late in my PhD, I worked as a teaching assistant (TA) for a large and popular
undergraduate class ‘Introduction to Philosophy of Education’. The course text,
Introduction to Philosophy of Education was by Robin Barrow, originally published
in 1975. The current professor for the course—who as a student had himself
been a TA for the same class under Barrow—gave me nearly complete licence to
conduct the five tutorial blocks however I saw fit, as long as we used and discussed
the course text.
The book presented a particular analytic and language-centric tradition of edu­
cational philosophy, originating in 1960s England and epitomized by the founda­
tional work of R.S. Peters. It proceeded to erect an educational philosophy from
an Aristotelian basis, most on display in Chapter 2 ‘What is it to be human?’, which
asked questions about what the distinctness of human beings meant for how we
think about and practise the work of education.
Barrow spun a familiar Enlightenment narrative—that we humans were unique
and distinct from the brute animals, precisely because of our capacity for rational
thought and, perhaps chiefly, for human language, and that furthermore it was these
unique capacities that made us able to undergo and reflect upon teaching and learn­
ing through educative processes. The chapter begins unequivocally: ‘Only a human
has the ability to use a language that allows us to do such things as hypothesize, im­
agine, predict, lie’ (2005: 21). Animals were described ultimately as unthinking au­
tomatons, conditioned by genes and responding mostly mechanistically to their
environments. Thus they were incapable of intentional learning and culture (cf. re­
cent research in animal studies, ethology and ecosemiotics: Laland and Janik 2006;
Laland 2008; Sastre 2018; Maran 2020).
Before discussing the book each week, I tried to first solicit my students’ re­
sponses and feelings about what they had read that week in the course text.
What I found, interestingly, is that it was this story of human exceptionalism, and
the general hubris through which it was conveyed, that most disturbed and preoccu­
pied the students in discussion. They posed questions such as: ‘Well, sure, maybe
animals don’t have language like humans, but that doesn’t mean they don’t commu­
nicate or make meaning or learn’ and (one of my favourites) ‘are humans really just
rational beings? I can think of a lot of humans who don’t act rationally?’
Mainly, they began to question a number of persistent dualisms on display in the
text, such as the duality of nature/culture (humans being on the side of culture, of
course), the notion of an educable mind (associated with intellect) distinct from a
C. Campbell • 461

trainable body (associated with atomized and discrete skills) the separation of feel­
ing, affect and emotions from logic and rationality (along with it a kind of reductive
sexism that implicitly places women on the side of emotions and feelings and men
on the side of reason and intellect).4
In short, I was noticing a different (ecological) sensibility in my young students
that explicitly rubbed up against this book: these young people were not buying

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overt anthropocentrism, and they were unhappy with Barrow’s unecological, cultur­
alist, and disembodied approach to the philosophy of education.
The real profundity of this nascent sensibility was made fully apparent to me
when I received a paper from a shy student from whom I had, at least until then,
barely heard from in tutorial sessions. Responding to the essay prompt ‘what
does being human have to do with education?’, the student wrote an impassioned
essay entitled simply ‘Being human is not enough!’. Her argument involved refuting
this central premise that the human is distinct from the animal but rather continu­
ous and in (ecological) relation, following from a basic conviction in the personhood
and intelligence of animals and a general commitment to ecological embeddedness
placing the burden of proof solely on anyone who questioned what was clearly (for
her at least) a fundamental aspect of life and ecology.
Interestingly, the structure of this argument is familiar to the fields of bio or eco­
semiotics (see Olteanu and Stables 2018; Campbell et al. 2019; Maran 2020;
Olteanu et al. 2020), animal studies and post-humanist discourses generally (see
Taylor 2017; Ulmer 2017; Stables 2020). In the context of a panel conversation
on how we might want to imagine living in a Anthropogenetic climate doomsday
situation, Cary Wolfe posed:

If you look at everything we’ve learned in field ecology, cognitive ethology, zoology, and other such
fields over the past 30 or 40 years […] it’s clear at this point that we are not the only persons […]
on the planet. And so, at that point things become very complicated. Because if asking the question of
doomsday is always the question of doomsday for whom, and if it’s always a question that’s always
asked from a specific and embedded location, then the interesting thing is that the human is not the
only meaning making location from which those questions of, not just of survival but also of value,
can be posed. (Wolfe and Colebrook 2013)

My student wanted to make a similar point: that we humans were not inherently the
best or the brightest, and not the only beings worthy of our consideration in edu­
cation or philosophy. She was, essentially, imagining a post-humanist and ecological
philosophy of education that honoured and took seriously the ‘more than human’,
that considered these silenced animal-beings as part of the educational conversation
(see Affifi et al. 2017; Blenkinsop et al. 2017; Taylor 2017; Taylor and
Pacini-Ketchabaw 2018; Morse et al. 2021)—rather than swiftly dismissing them
at the beginning of a text book.
Shortly after I saw this essay across my desk, I asked students from the five tu­
torial blocks if they might be interested in having informal dialogue sessions to
4
‘[A] capacity that is discrete and can be perfected through practice and exercise’ (Barrow 1990: 24;
see also Barrow 1987).
462 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2

continue several climate change themed discussions that had started to recurrently
come up in class, partially in response to this chapter and the human-centred tone/
perspective from the course text. Thereafter I commenced running semi-regular
climate change dialogue groups, every second or third week, with a small, slightly
rotating six to twelve-person group of students. I worked on the same course the
following semester, and these dialogue groups continued, semi-regularly with

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new students. Even after we dramatically switched all education online in March
due to COVID-19, these groups continued virtually. Since then, dialoguing with
my students about life and living in the Anthropocene has become a central aspect
of all the courses I teach and design. Though I have moved on to teach and design
several other courses with explicit climate change-related topics, I find myself con­
tinually looking back on the notes and recordings that emerged in these first dia­
logue groups, as the questions these students were able to ponder and articulate
still seem foundational.
I came to understand that the place to begin, pedagogically, was decidedly not to
follow the approach I saw enacted in the environmental studies tutorial with which I
shared a classroom: through an endless barrage of facts and modelling predictions,
that if carefully adhered to could, just maybe(?), create controllable ‘sustainable fu­
tures’. By talking with young people, I realized that they were generally extremely
knowledgeable about the facts of climate change and were simply fed up with
what Morton calls ‘information dump mode’: ‘Ecological information delivery
mode in the media [and, arguably, in much educational practice and research]
seems most often to consist of what we could call an information dump. At least
one factoid—and often a whole plateful—seems to be falling on to our heads.
And this falling has an authoritative quality […]’ (Morton 2018: xviii). Global
warming, behind all this factiness seems unquestionable and essentially
de-ontological—it presents data as unequivocable—denying the basic (semiotic)
observation that ‘[i]n order to have a fact you need two things: data, and an
interpretation of that data’ (Morton 2018: 19–20). Morton goes on to unpack this:

A factoid is (usually quite small) chunk of data that has been interpreted so as to appear truthful. …
a factoid is truthy because it is in accord with what we think facts are. And because of scientism, the
common belief that science tells us something about the world in the same way that a religion
might do, we think that facts are totally simple and straight: they come out of things themselves.
(Morton 2018: 19–20)

The problem, as it appeared to me and my students, is that this heavy emphasis on


facts provides us very little space or room to feel and live through the implications,
resonances, and disturbances that these facts bring up in relation to our own life and
living. As it was increasingly revealed through dialogue, what these students were
craving was the opportunity to situate themselves and their own experience
amongst all this factiness. One first-year student from these groups highlighted
the issue clearly when they said: ‘The funny thing is a lot of my [high school] classes
did actually talk about climate change. But they focus on facts, and I guess, fixes or
solutions. They don’t really ask for our experiences with this stuff.’
C. Campbell • 463

Todd Dufrenes has put this guiding question at the heart of his book The
Democracy of Suffering: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, Philosophy in the
Anthropocene, asking: ‘what does our present time have to do with the future of hu­
man subjects? What has any of it to do with what philosophers call ‘ontology,’ with
being? More simply put, what does it have to do with you and me?’ (2019: 8). Such
an existential and world-centred approach towards education (Biesta 2021a) in the

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Anthropocene, I argue, requires that we turn facts into knowing, not to offer solu­
tions from a place of hubris or technocratic certainty, but simply to wonder ‘how to
go on living from here?’ (See Bonnett 2013, 2017; for a critique of scientism within
the context of EE, see, Stickney and Bonnett 2020). Accepting this means that,
much more than offering fixes to ongoing sustainability problems or transmitting
climate change data, the guiding question of climate change education becomes
‘how do you want to spend today?’ (Bringhurst and Zwicky 2018: 30; see also
Verlie 2019)—not jumping immediately to ‘how do we fix this?’, but rather the
more foundational question—‘how can we inhabit ourselves in this time?’. As
Tim Lilburn says: how can we understand climate change and the Anthropocene
condition, as a contemplative and ontological problem, ‘a problem concerning in­
teriority’? (Dickenson et al. 2021; see also Lilburn and Campbell 2019).
As a teacher, enacting this kind of existential approach involves cultivating a
dialogue/space that allows students to inhabit possible ecological futures—not
the future as planned, managed, and accounted for by sustainable development,
but the radically open, ambiguous future that students were experiencing and begin­
ning to articulate (Wallin 2017; Jandrić and Ford 2022). This confrontation with
existential uncertainty has important implications for the role of teachers engaged
in climate change education, specifically, in creating pedagogical spaces and oppor­
tunities where uncertainty, precarity, vulnerability, and intense emotions can be met
and explored—not reductive ‘solutions talk’, but a kind of active dialogical listening
(Roche 2011). Similarly, Lehtonen et al. note: ‘Listening, being present and in
dialogue, emotional expression and small acts of caring are the most efficient assets
of climate change education’ (2019: 353).
Here, it is important to qualify that this contemplative–existential orientation
towards climate change education no doubt lends itself better to certain subjects
and curricular domains than others. As observed by a thoughtful peer reviewer,
this may very well resonate with ‘an English teacher using dystopic novels or eco-
poetry’, but a science teacher ‘trying to cover things like bio-accumulation of tox­
ins or how plastics break down in our water […]’ may find this inherently more
difficult to incorporate into their teaching. Indeed, the fields of EE and philosophy
of education must be sensitive to the myriad ways climate change pedagogy comes
into practice across different subjects and areas of the curriculum, recognizing that
only a plurality of pedagogical forms (Masschelein 2019; see also Stables 2020)
will be commensurate to the massive challenges of climate change education.
Still, I would maintain that while certainly easier to incorporate in some sub­
ject/domains, there exists a general aim for all environmental educators to instil
caring relationships with That-Which-is-To-Be-Learnt (see Stables 2019b), and
464 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2

importantly, to instil response-ability (Stables 2012)—which, for the late Andy


Stables, is not a moral pronouncement (what our students should do), but rather
simply, the evolving capacity to respond as part of a ‘dialogical process of self-
becoming not just by individuals, but relational to a group, community and the
environment’ (Campbell et al. 2021: 4). As will be discussed in conclusion, this
requires a pedagogical responsibility and ethos seeped in ecological principles of

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being with and seeking out plurality, participation, and complexity (see
Chinnery 2015; Campbell 2017, 2018b; Kull 2018). So, even (or perhaps espe­
cially?) the science teacher, after (or before?) enacting a lesson on ‘how plastics
break down in water’ would, through such an approach, strive to find ways to con­
nect the facts of this lesson with the student’s local water systems, watersheds and
waterways (see, for inspiration, Hill et al. 2021). To put this in terms of Latour’s
(2004) earlier-mentioned distinctions, there exists a critical educational impera­
tive—especially in this historical moment of acute climate crisis—to raise our
pedagogy from ‘matters of fact’ to ‘matters of value and concern’.
In what follows I will argue that students need to be granted pedagogical forms
(Masschelein 2019; Jandrić and Ford 2022) and experiential opportunities to
live well in the Anthropocene (Bai et al. 2020)—to understand and imagine pos­
sible ecological futures resonant with their own localities, timelines, and places
and not only be shown a position in an existing and totalizing vision of the future
(Hern et al. 2018; Stables 2019a). However, it is repeatedly stressed that ‘living eco­
logical facts is difficult’ as it often requires ‘that we shouldn’t immediately know what
to do’ (Morton 2018: 28). I emphasize throughout this article that embracing this
uncertainty and radical ambiguity is an important, often neglected, aspect of climate
change education. Again, and importantly, this is not a one-size-fits-all approach,
and these forms and opportunities must be cultivated across the curriculum through
diverse practices—and not only or solely through the philosophical–dialogic prac­
tices discussed in this paper.
However, before we can embrace this uncertainty, we first need to foster our
awareness—to look around and ask ourselves ‘what’s happening?’.

WHAT’S HAPPENING?
I’m pretty sure you’ve all noticed, that the world is not in good shape. People, animals, they are
suffering. (Second-year student)

The thing that my students mostly wanted to talk about in these sessions was the
present moment and what it meant for them and their futures. Our conversations
often began with acknowledging the reality of current life in the Anthropocene: how
the sun and sky had been blocked out for three weeks in Vancouver that summer
behind harsh and choking wildfire smoke, and how this affected us, emotionally and
physically, some more than others. We also spoke about our fears and hopes and
what we saw as possible and impossible in our world: what to eat, where to live,
sharing our feelings about intimate life decisions like reasons for having or not hav­
ing children, asking questions about what constituted meaningful employment,
C. Campbell • 465

exploring throughout the relationship between human flourishing (eudaimonia)—


a central concept in the course, and its embeddedness in ecological flourishing
(which we will return to discuss in the final ‘What now?’ section).

Sharing our stories

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This pedagogical and dialogical process of turning towards the world largely con­
sisted of sharing stories and feelings, and noticing commonalities between our stor­
ies and feelings. As such I would describe this process, like Biesta (2021a), as a
world-centred approach to education, rather than a simplistically student-centred or
subject/discipline-centred approach.
With this first stage of asking and noticing ‘what’s happening?’, I, as teacher was
concerned, not with answering student concerns or facilitating learning about these
topics, but rather responding to them wholeheartedly, in the sense of being honest
about my own journey and my emotions around these issues (see ‘pedagogy of the
journey’ in Lilburn and Campbell 2019). This involves, as Biesta says, referencing
Bertolt Brecht, a process of interesting students in the world and working, in often
subtle ways, to sustain this interest through dialogue (2021a: 10).
By engaging in collective sharing and reflection, and precisely by allowing our­
selves to feel emotions—primarily grief, sadness, and anxiety—in relation to these
events, we were, in a sense able to take in the world around us, to notice it—to be
affected by it (see Stanger 2016; Bryan 2020; Jandrić and Ford 2022). Le Grange
describes this as a core aspect of EE in/for the Anthropocene: ‘The subject of edu­
cation who is post-anthropocentric is not an atomised individual but is ecological;
embedded in the material flows of the earth/cosmos, constitutive of these flows,
making the subject imperceptible. Pedagogies that are produced in the classroom
are not performed on the earth but bent by the earth […]’ (2016: 34; my italics).
This perspective of ‘being bent by the earth’—not constructing, using, interpreting,
but being changed, marked—was, in all effects, inevitable and avoidable once we
collectively turned our attentions to the reality of life in the Anthropocene. In
this world-centred approach to climate change education, learning and teaching
emerge and present themselves perhaps not primarily through a metaphor of con­
struction (systematically developed, one brick on top of the other), but rather more
directly as affectability (the ability to be affected) (see Biesta 2017; see also Roth
2011).5
This practice of sharing stories was essential in order to address this question of
‘what’s happening?’ and embark on this process of turning towards the world.
Within policy and planning research in particular, narrative approaches have
been proposed to bridge the gap between policy and local knowledges and
5
Analogously, Ingold (2015: vii) elaborates the dynamics of a non-representational approach to re­
search and education (cf. Ingold 2017) as co-relational and participatory—expressed in our corporeal
entanglements and continual becoming; the outcome of which is not a representation of the world
but ‘a correspondence, in the sense of not coming up with some exact match or simulacrum for what
we find in the things and happenings going on around us, but of answering them with interventions, ques­
tions, and responses of our own’ (emphasis in original) (see also Vannini 2015).
466 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2

experiences of climate change (Paschen and Ison 2014; see also Lehtonen et al.
2019: 341). These authors argue that without careful attention and unravelling
of these narratives, both education and policy will fail to empower people with op­
portunities, practices, concepts, and ideas resonant with their own localities, knowl­
edge, and experience (see Gough and Stables 2012; Stables 2019a).
Yet, despite widespread recognitions within scholarship and research on the im­

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portance of narrative and storytelling in climate change policy and education, my
students (at least) complained that they were rarely invited to discuss and imagine
their own possible futures in their education. One young woman, for instance, told a
story about the recent destruction of a wooded area near the university that was
home to a community of rabbits, and her shock and sadness at witnessing, one
morning, that the site had been logged and cleared.6 Other students quickly noticed
other ways they had been prodded and encouraged to devalue animal life and dis­
regard animal intelligence and emotions—such as, to offer another example we dis­
cussed, ideas around factory-farming practices that disregard animal suffering and
try to minimize societal awareness and confrontations with animal suffering (see
Greenwood and McKee 2020: 79).
Realizing this persistent denial of the ‘more than human’ and fostering our col­
lective ability to recognize and name this denial through curricular and peda­
gogical interventions is a core component of ‘dialoguing’ through the
Anthropocene (see Affifi et al. 2017; Morse et al. 2021). Noticing for themselves
this persistent rejection and silencing of the non-human—and the manifold ways
this silencing has been normalized, reinforced, and maintained, some students
were driven to question the limits of an approach to climate change education
that focused on scientific literacy at the expense of other aspects of relating, learn­
ing, knowing, and feeling.
This schism between experiential and affective dimensions of climate change on
one hand, and empirical data and scientific literacy on the other, has been well dis­
cussed in EE. For instance, Leishanko and O’Brian observe at the opening of their
recent editorial article ‘Teaching climate change in the Anthropocene’:
[…] climate change courses and curricular interventions primarily emphasize scientific literacy
through a focus on physical processes, documentation of rising emissions, and empirical evidence
of a changing climate. Classroom explorations of responses to climate change are often limited to
‘business-as-usual’ policy options, new technologies, and behavioral interventions to reduce emis­
sions or promote adaptation. (2020: 2213)

Again, the problem is that within such ‘business as usual’ approaches to climate
change education, there is effectively no room to be in relation to this knowledge,
to even take in what is happening. Leishanko and O’Brian (p. 2213) continue:
‘As a result, students have difficulty recognizing social, psychological, and emotional
6
This student explained to us how, after trying to describe her feelings of grief and sadness to family
and friends, she felt that her concerns for the animals were diminished. She reflected further how even her
education seemed to diminish the more than human in both tiny and not so tiny ways: ‘Like, I feel like I
wasn’t able to ask this question, to say that it mattered. […] It was stupid to care about these animals
[…]’.
C. Campbell • 467

dimensions of the issue, and often fail to see openings, possibilities, and entry points
for active engagement with sustainability transformations.’7
No doubt, part of the reason why storytelling and dialogue-based approaches
to EE are so compelling is that the future in the Anthropocene is radically unpre­
dictable and still needs to be collectively experienced and imagined. It is doubtful
that truly sustainable social–ecological systems can be reached through existing

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policy mechanisms, maintaining current economic systems and regulations that
privilege accelerated and continuous growth/development (see Greenwood
2014). Furthermore, such totalized and rationalistic understandings of the future
function to diminish our capacity for agentive, adaptive, and ethical response
(Stables and Bishop 2001; Gough and Stables 2012; Leal Filho and McCrea
2019; Lehtonen et al. 2019: 348; Bai 2020; see also Selby 2010). Ultimately—
and as discussed later on in the ‘What now?’ section—what is needed are peda­
gogical responses and interventions that make apparent ‘pathways for flourish­
ing’ that centre our own embedded and complex relationships to this immense
topic.
Why/when the Anthropocene?
It was by tuning to our collective reality of what’s happening? that the surprising
pedagogical potential of the Anthropocene concept emerged—not from me in
fact, but from several students who had been inspired by the recent cinematic docu­
mentary film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018). In fact, I had no initial inten­
tion of discussing this particular concept in these dialogue groups at all. If anything,
I initially resisted this term (see Morton 2014). That said, I quickly noticed how the
concept allowed us, quite basically, to put ourselves somewhere in relation to the
earth’s current unfolding: at the end of a period of relative calm and stability in
planetary weather systems, the Holocene period, and at the beginning of a new geo­
logical period, marked by extreme unpredictable weather events and planetary glo­
bal warming as a direct result of rapidly accelerating human fossil fuel consumption.
Instead, what occurred was that several students began organically bringing up this
concept in relation to these topics, and we discovered it to be a useful heuristic guide
to help us make sense of the kinds of feelings and experiences we were collectively
processing (see Brennan 2017; Greenwood 2014: 289; Misiaszek 2020; Mychajliw
et al. 2015; Somerville 2018).
One thing, students were generally quick to pose once this notion of
Anthropocene was introduced was, quite understandably, ‘so when did this all hap­
pen?’. This brought us to a series of familiar questionings: the agricultural revolu­
tion? the industrial revolution? the post-war period? This encouraged some

7
Still, here we should again note that certain classes and subjects (such as Philosophy of Education)
are better suited to provide such reflective–dialogical openings as well as the important point that con­
stant existential and reflective dialoguing across educational domains can potentially lead to fatigue and
apathy in the face of HICC.
468 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2

students to look up the actual debate amongst Anthropocene scholars.8 We were


surprised to learn that one of the main scientists to coin the concept, atmospheric
chemist Paul Crutzen, later backpedalled on his initial dating of 1784 as the start of
the Anthropocene, and before his death in early 2021 came to cite 1945—the date
that marks the huge data spike in human involvement in earth systems called ‘The
Great Acceleration’, corresponding to the immediate post-World War II period—

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or the baby boom era (see Steffen et al. 2007, 2015).
This recognition in itself was disturbing and uncanny to address as it brought
things much closer to home historically. This caused us to recognize, quite basically,
that it was not humans in general that caused these disturbing conditions, but a re­
cent type of modern, Western human, and the high-consumption and extractivist
societies they have created and proliferated across the planet through colonization
and global capitalism (see Morton 2018: 43).
I would be remiss if I did not report that a sense of generational betrayal was fre­
quently brought up in these groups, once we put these ‘factoids’ into perspective.9
Ultimately, this feeling of blame or betrayal was short lived, and students were quick
to want to discuss what this meant for their own lives and futures. And this is where
we arrive at a crucial though often upsetting and overwhelming aspect of this pro­
cess of dialoguing the Anthropocene condition/experience: the impact of all this on
one’s own reality, one’s own life and decision-making.

WHY ME?
I grew up always wanting to have a family and kids. Now I’m not so sure. I mean, it really scares me
what’s going on. The fires, the smoke, all the animals with nowhere to go. Where am I going to go?
(Third-year student)

This question of ‘why me?’ was generally always accompanied by an overwhelming


feeling of doom. That doomsday question, though not in this moment of awareness
a ‘doomsday for whom?’ as we heard posed by Cary Wolfe earlier, but quite un­
equivocally a doomsday for me. This involves recognizing the realities and implica­
tions of mass ecological destruction for one’s own life, in terms of coming to terms
with one’s own restricted possibilities.
At this stage in the conversation, our discussions generally centred around the
theme of choices, where what was generally seen and expressed as ‘a lack of choice’
in deciding one’s own future was predominant. Where do I live? What to do? What to
eat? Should I have children? How to make money? This was a process of coming to
8
Here, it is interesting to note (as observed by a helpful anonymous reviewer) that, by foregrounding
our own experiences and concerns in relation to this topic we have circled back into a ‘fact-based’
conversation—reflecting my earlier point that this is in no way an argument against fact-based climate
change education (either/or), but rather an inquiry into its limits.
9
Journalist David Wallace-Wells writes in a 2017 article: ‘more than half of the carbon humanity ex­
haled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the
end of World War II, the figure is 85 per cent. Which means that in the length of a single generation,
global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial
world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a lifetime’ (cited in Dufresne 2019: 61).
C. Campbell • 469

terms with the general undecidability that we could now see would begin to char­
acterize life in the Anthropocene.10
Ultimately, this kind of anxious concern for the future gradually settled into a
feeling of all-embracing grief. As Head notes at the very opening of his Hope and
Grief in the Anthropocene: ‘This is the converging, congealing grief at the loss of
the conditions that underpin contemporary western prosperity. It is grief for the ap­

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proaching demise of the conditions underpinning life as we know it—the thing
most of us did not know was called the Holocene. It is grief for the loss of a future
characterised by hope.’ (2016: 2)
I recognize this confrontation with grief as a necessary step towards pedagogy
that meaningfully acknowledges the Anthropocene: this is teaching and learning
that foregrounds the contemplative work of ‘learning how to die in the
Anthropocene’ (Scranton 2015; see also Wallin 2017; Bringhurst and Zwicky
2018; Greenwood and McKee 2020). There is a somewhat paradoxical peda­
gogical unfurling here worth noting: how, after first trying to acknowledge per­
spectives and timescales beyond the human in our learning about the
Anthropocene concept, we inevitably fall back into an explicitly humanist dia­
logical space in our concern for our own life and life choices. Just as acknowledg­
ing life continuing beyond your own death constitutes a basic kind of death
literacy (Greenwood and McKee 2020; see also Affifi and Christie 2018) so
does acknowledging a reality for humanity beyond our current civilization.
Scranton explains this kind of confrontation with the death of a civilization as
an essential beginning for acknowledging how to live in the Anthropocene, claim­
ing, in an earlier 2013 New York Times article of the same title of his 2015 book,
that ‘[t]he biggest problem we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this
civilisation is already dead’.
One of the most difficult aspects of the ‘why me?’ conversation was indeed the
recognition that our current civilizational order may(/will) decline and collapse
(see Besley and Peters 2020: 1352). Yet, despite calls for a renewed discussion
around death amongst these Anthropocene commentators and scholars, death is
strangely absent from our educational frameworks, which would prefer to talk about
life and growth (see Affifi and Christie 2018)—without, perhaps, fully acknowledg­
ing the importance of death and decay to the ecological and the living. Greenwood
and McKee elaborate on the moral and educational aims of death literacy for the
Anthropocene:

The purpose of death literacy is not to tame death or to alleviate the pain of grief and loss. […] If
anything, death literacy will awaken the pain of death, and of all loss and grief, and dignify it with
fuller awareness, […]—a way of turning toward pain (rather than away from it), and of allowing
the reality of our vulnerability and the inevitability of loss and grief to burn through our emotional
bodies. (2020: 76)
10
Some student examples highlight these feelings and concerns: ‘I always wanted to live in the in­
terior, when I was older. […] Like, I grew up with horses, and I always thought, yup that’s where I’d
be—living with my horses, near where I grew up. With all the smoke and fires, my neighbor’s ranch
got burned down in 2017, […] I really don’t think it’s going to work.’
470 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2

In these Anthropocene dialogue groups our collective sharing of feelings of sadness


for animal suffering and ecological destruction led us to at least nascently acknow­
ledge death, in its various iterations and meanings. Turning towards the pain of
these non-human others created an opening from which to acknowledge this
pain in our own lives; to let this grief ‘burn through our emotional bodies’.
The ultimate outcome of the ‘why me?’ questioning is a settling into this grief, to

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recognize and appreciate something larger than yourself. The pedagogical approach
of turning towards uncertainty and embracing and confronting deep-rooted anxie­
ties around our own highly uncertain futures offers possibilities to tune in to a more
collective vision of the future—not my future but our future, not myself but ourselves
(see Ott 2022).
In some sense, acknowledging with wholehearted despondency the devastation
of the sixth extinction was a necessary part of our coming to confront life in the
Anthropocene beyond the human, that is from an ecological perspective—an opening
from which we come to care about non-human beings in conscious and deliberate
ways.
The curricular unfurling, in a nutshell, is such: once the self and its concerns can
be brought forward, confronted, acknowledged, and responded to in the classroom/
conversational space, then a world or perspective beyond the self can be sought—a
reframing that, ideally but not always in practice, will still allow the self to be itself in
relation to the world, though not in a narrowly egotistical way (see Biesta 2021b;
Bai et al. 2021). That is a dialogical–pedagogical space that simultaneously takes
us in, by continually offering us entry points into engagement and dialogue, while
also being both frightening, challenging, and often emotionally and cognitively
overwhelming.

WHAT NOW?
Maybe you’re not saving the world or anything, but it orients you differently, like in terms of how
you live your life, and that’s something. (Second-year student)

To reiterate: this question of how to live well and meaningfully in the Anthropocene
appeared later on in the dialoguing process, after students first acknowledged more
foundational considerations pertaining to their own lives (‘what’s happening?’ and
‘why me?’). In some ways, this ‘what now?’ dialoguing process intersected with our
earlier conversational phase of acknowledging ‘what’s happening?’, as both focused
prominently on sharing stories and experiences about ways to live meaningfully in the
face of ecological catastrophe. But seriously, ‘what now?’.
As these dialogue groups emerged from an introduction course to the philosophy
of education, with a specific section of the curriculum on virtue ethics and philo­
sophical conceptions of human flourishing (eudaimonia), we became aware that
we were in part discussing and exploring ecological virtues, as guides or means to
flourish in the face of widespread crisis and despair. But what does it mean to
live well in the Anthropocene and what constitutes these kinds of ecological virtues?
This is the central question at the heart of the recent volume, edited by Bai, Chang
C. Campbell • 471

and Scott, A Book of Ecological Virtues: Living Well in the Anthropocene. Given that
we are living in the Anthropocene and are witnesses to the attendant suffering of all
forms of life, what changes do we need to make to our lives in order to minimize
suffering and maximize well-being for all? Put differently, what does living well,
and suffering well, look like in the Anthropocene?’ (2020: xi; see also Bleier 2021).
Our discussion on virtue ethics proved, in fact, to be useful in exploring this line

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of existential questioning further. In order to ‘maximize well-being for all’ we real­
ized for instance that we had to extend our understanding of human flourishing to
acknowledge the human’s joint ecological dependence and embeddedness. We
noted that this broader ecological flourishing upon which human flourishing is a
part was already recognized, at least implicitly, in much of the eudaimonia literature
we looked at. For instance, we observed how MacIntyre’s (1999) approach to virtue
ethics, which focuses on reanimating virtues of ‘acknowledged dependence’, recog­
nizing the broader ‘networks of giving and receiving’ in which the individual is em­
bedded, was inherently resonant with an ecological sensibility (Hannis 2015; see
also Hannis in Bai et al. 2020: 83).
Frankly, as building out from our ‘why me?’ dialogue, what we were seeking was a
framework to situate our own needs, fears, and expectations for the future. We real­
ized through this talk and proposal of living well in the Anthropocene that we were
talking about ecological virtues not as character traits we need to acquire in order to
flourish as humans, but rather as meaningful lifeways for flourishing.11
Ultimately, these conversations about life in the Anthropocene hinged upon
what it means and perhaps more importantly, what it takes, to embrace less materi­
alistic (see Lehtonen et al. 2019: 343) and non-dominating relationships to the
‘more than human’ in a culture that both reduces all decisions and life events to
forms of consumption and consistently diminishes the concerns of animals and
the planet (see O’Sullivan 2001, 2003). But what opportunities did we have for pur­
suing this flourishing in the face of so much grief and despair? Here, again, the stu­
dents would share transformative realizations they had experienced that caused
them to act differently and changed their relationship to this topic of climate
change.12
Most importantly in terms of our conversation on virtues (see Jordan and
Kristjánsson 2017), these were realizations that opened up a pathway, a means,
for us to pursue or consider a flourishing existence—or the shared discovery of
embodied pathways of living that we enact and reflect upon. These are, what
11
This difference in orientation is actually at the root of the distinction between the two main ‘eu­
daimonistic’ approaches to virtue ethics (see Oakley 1996). Falkenberg elaborates this distinction in his
contribution to the aforementioned A Book of Ecological Virtues saying: ‘Compared to the first version, in
this second version living a virtuous life or being a virtuous person is not a constitutive part of a flourish­
ing life but rather contributes to or is a means for living a flourishing life’ (Bai et al. 2020: 169).
12
These realizations were both subtle and profound: students shared stories about switching to eat­
ing locally and seasonally, or to vegan or vegetarian diets, reflecting on the specific events or realizations
that provoked this life decision; I and one other student shared our personal reasons for not driving and
the various decisions we made to resist the destructive aspects of North American car culture in our life
choices, etc.
472 • Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2023, Vol. 57, No. 2

Kahn describes as eco-pedagogies that, by continually questioning and transform­


ing the lifeworld can reveal ‘the larger hidden curriculum of unsustainable life’
(2010: 22) and thus look to cultivate ‘critical dialogue and self-reflexive solidarity’
(pp. 27–28) across different social groups and institutions.
We fully acknowledged that—though far from solving anything on a systemic
level—discussing together our values allowed us to, in some small but notable

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ways, change our understanding and experience of these issues and even sometimes
act agentively and meaningfully in the face of them (see Hill et al. 2021).
Furthermore, by sharing these experiences and insights from a place, not of control,
judgement, or comparison, but of shared reflection and meaning making, we ac­
knowledged ‘the I who appears’ in these conversations (see Biesta 2020a)—that
is, an approach that specifically centred our existential becoming and awareness,
or the domain of educational practice Biesta has called subjectification: ‘without a
concern for the subject-ness of the student, that is, for the possibility for the student
to exist as subject, education ceases to be educational and becomes the manage­
ment of objects, effective or otherwise’ (Biesta 2021a: 8; cf. Biesta 2020b). This no­
tion of subjectification also accounts for the possibility that a student may/will
reject or dismiss the teacher’s offering—and indeed, any reflective–dialogical ap­
proach to climate change education will have to grapple with and confront apathy,
denial, and rejection.13

CONCLUDING REMARKS
Any serious kind of reflection on climate change provokes deep-rooted existential
questioning. As explored in this article, these kinds of questions range from ‘what
does it mean to be human?’ to ‘what does it mean to live well, in this moment of
anxiety and worry?’, and ‘what does it mean to acknowledge and care meaningfully
about non-human life?’. Perhaps the most difficult (but perhaps also central) aspect
of an existential approach to climate change education is that it moves us away from
an explicit concern with representing the facts and reality of life in the
Anthropocene towards experiencing holistically what this means for our living, right
now in this moment. What is revealed through this dialoguing is a kind of world-
centred commitment: a commitment to try to ‘stay in and with the world’
(Biesta 2021a) even if this is difficult or messy; to respond to the precarity of the
present moment and what it demands of us, even if this process is uncomfortable
or distressing (see Chinnery 2015; Wallin 2017). It involves fully taking in fears
and anxieties, loss, and pain, when they emerge in these conversations (Stanger
2016). As discussed in the ‘Why me?’ and ‘What now?’ sections, most fundamen­
tally, this work involves recognizing limits; ‘that the world, natural and social,
puts limits and limitations on what we can desire from it and can do with it’
(Biesta 2021a: 3), which is, as Biesta further observes ‘both the question of democ­
racy and of ecology’ (p. 3).
13
Indeed, our discussion groups confronted this early on, through the basic fact that they had begun
assembling outside of class hours, extra-curricular to the course, while the majority of their peers did not.
C. Campbell • 473

Of course, the shape of this work cannot ultimately be dictated by a kind of teach­
ing strategy but a rather a pedagogical ethos, rooted in, what I would claim are fun­
damentally ecological principles of being with and seeking out plurality,
participation, and complexity: ‘the wider and more complete participation of all
components in a whole’ (Bookchin, cited in Hern et al. 2018: 91). Ultimately,
this involves a kind of pedagogical responsibility that requires teachers and students

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to call forth ‘a new way of being with and being for each other— […] a way of re­
sponding to each other that cannot be prescribed or predicted in advance, but
which emerges only in the moment of response’; (Chinnery 2015: 9 [emphasis added];
see also Ojala 2012a, 2012b, 2016). However, this kind of pedagogical responsibility
—to really talk about climate change in the sense of fully and meaningfully attuning
ourselves to the realities of a precarious global climate emergency—this is no small
or easy task. Still, as I and my students confronted our new reality of fires, floods,
smoke, and devastation, we also realized and understood that this was the only path
left to walk.
Writing this through late 2021 and 2022, I am struck by how these conversations
have only increased and accelerated with my students, along with the extreme cli­
mate change events (a destructive and deadly heat dome in the summer, extreme
flooding in the autumn of 2021, and so on). Though we may be, at one level, drown­
ing in facts and information, we are still in a stage of pre-conversation when it comes
to addressing what really matters: what it means to live well, flourish, suffer, and die
(Lilburn 2017; see also Lilburn and Campbell 2019).
The question we must ask as educators and curriculum theorists is how can we
support, animate, inspire, and contribute to this dialoguing through the
Anthropocene—how can we continue to be in, with, and even for the world, in
the face of this loss and suffering?

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