Beyond voice: Listening and silence in climate change education

Abstract

This mosaic essay reflects on the invitation to speak to a JME symposium on Education and Climate Change and the convenors’ request for participants to engage with the previous history of scholarship on education and environment in this journal. It begins by recognising that the world is still confronting deepening ecological and climate degradation, despite 50 years of calls for transformation and despite a long tradition of environmental and sustainability education. As environmental education becomes a form of ‘climate education’ that increasingly emphasises student voice and climate action in the face of seeming intransigence, this essay asks whether the capacity to listen deeply might also be a necessary feature of such education in a warming world. The mosaic form of the essay is both a reflection on the inadequacies and limitations of academic speech at this time, and an invitation to explore, with the reader, what it might mean to create spaces of listening and attunement to (human and non-human) others and to the self, in our work as academics and as educators.