Activism or Bureaucracy: What Are We Teaching Students Through Local Climate Action Projects?

Abstract

Advancing student empowerment through climate action projects in K-12 classrooms is an often-cited goal in the climate change education community, specifically to ameliorate the mental health challenges experienced by K-12 students in association with climate change. Less discussed, however, are the orientations-of-action (1) that manifest in classroom activity in the context of such projects: the extent to which classroom activity is oriented more towards critically questioning and reimagining systems (activism) or more towards working within the context of existing systems (bureaucracy). Here, we discuss orientations-of-action within classroom projects in the context of a professional development program around justice-centered climate change pedagogy in an urban school setting. In the context of teacher accounts of classroom activity, we define an orientations-of-action rubric and observe a progression towards bureaucratic orientations-of-action through different elements of classroom projects. Through two focal projects we explore this progression, as well as teacher intentionality with respect to orientations-of-action.