Education for the Planet:
Building Universal Climate Literacy with Children’s Literature and Media
Professional development workshop organized by Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies in partnership with the Center for Climate Literacy at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, USA
The climate emergency presents us with an existential challenge, in which business-as-usual ways of living our lives and doing our work amount to complicity with the destruction of our planetary home. How do we take a stand? How do we make a difference, especially in our professional capacities? This two-day workshop will address these questions for teachers, academics, and other educators who work with young people. Led by Marek Oziewicz, Director of the Center for Climate Literacy at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, the workshop will help you understand why climate change and the Anthropocene are primarily challenges to our story systems. You will watch two films, read a couple of picturebooks, explore Finnish ecofiction, and participate in discussions about how stories model climate literacy practices and lifestyles. You will learn about climate literacy as a broader competence that includes the knowledge of facts and numbers but centers on developing attitudes, values, and behavioral change aligned with how we should live to respect our planetary home. You will learn about the work of the Center for Climate Literacy and about opportunities to use its resources in your teaching and research.
The workshop is open to anyone interested in sharing transformational children’s stories with their families and friends, but it will be of special value to teachers and educators. It will help you appreciate why literature, film, and other narrative media for young audiences are the best technology for social transformation and why sharing insights about these stories is the best strategy for accelerating a transition to an ecological civilization.
This workshop will be offered in an in-person format, between 9:00 and 15:00 (with a lunch break 12:30 and 13:30). It will consist of two 6-hour sessions on July 5-6, followed by about 2 hours of online activities in the following week. Download a detailed schedule of the event here.
Number of participants: 20-25
Register by Friday June 23 through this form (click here)