Environmental wicked problems in middle school - emotional work in the happenstance

Abstract

As a society, we face increasingly complex and intertwined environmental issues, such as extreme weather events, droughts, sea level rise, and unprecedented loss of biodiversity. The extent and ramifications of these issues remain largely unknown and clear-cut solutions are out of reach. We thus refer to them as environmental wicked problems (WPs). For decades, schools have been seen as the place where younger generations should learn about WPs and acquire a large variety of tools to face them. Instead, in this paper, we turn to emotions, and our aim is to explore how they come to matter in educational activities on WPs. To do this, we facilitate encounters between students and environmental WPs via process drama, thus opening up a space, a happenstance. There, students are not asked to resolve the environmental WPs, but are allowed to experience them, and thus (re)act and relate to situations, as well as human and non-human objects. Under the framing of Sara Ahmed’s ‘sociality of emotions’, we study these happenstance encounters, the emotions that emerge and we then unpack what these emotions do, their work, both to the activity and to its participants.