“Most of our people prefer to go abroad nowadays than staying here. They prefer it because the conditions of life here forced them … But there are many predators along the way, so before they even reach where they intended, they get caught by these predators who profit off people’s lives.”
Ikal Angelei, director of Friends of Lake Turkana, a non-profit organisation in Kenya

“We had drought every 10 years, then it became every five years, then it became every two years. But now we’re seeing it randomly every year.”
Asad, a mother at Digaale Internally Displaced Persons Camp in Somaliland

How on earth do teachers begin to tackle the huge, era-defining issue of climate change?

Simply raising awareness among students does not seem to be the imperative any more - the huge turnouts at last year’s climate strikes suggest that young people are more than aware. And for anyone not paying attention until now, the ubiquity of cataclysmic images of the Australian bushfires can scarcely have been missed.

Pupils now also have a figurehead in 17-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg - one of Tes Scotland’s 10 people of the year for 2019 - who has become a conduit for the simmering anger about climate change that is deeply felt by millions of young people around the world.

The difficulty, then, would appear to be not how to get young people to care - but how to ensure they are not overwhelmed because they care so much. And the powerful quotes above point a way forward.

The problem with rage is that it can be paralysing rather than energising. And if young people feel like they are being bombarded with prophesies of doom about the planet’s future, they could be forgiven for collapsing in despair instead of trying to do something to avert catastrophe.

So, how can we help students to connect with the issue of climate change in a way that gives them hope? The answer, according to those behind a bold new Scottish project, is an age-old one: by forging human connections and telling stories.

“We think it’s really important that there is hope, given … a lot of the reporting [of climate change] is apocalyptic,” says Ali Watson, a professor in international relations at the University of St Andrews and co-founder of the Third Generation Project, an international think tank based in Scotland that provides research and advocacy around human rights and climate justice.

The new think tank started a trial climate change project late in 2019, titled Breaking the 4th Wall of Climate Migration, with senior students at three Fife schools involved: Bell Baxter High in Cupar, Madras College in St Andrews and, from the independent sector, St Leonards School, also in St Andrews. This was initially a six-week series of 90-minute workshops that brought together journalists, human-rights advocates, academics and students to talk about the human costs of climate change and how digital storytelling can be harnessed to raise awareness.

The power of storytelling

So, what is it that makes this project stand out? For Watson, it is largely about the richness of the materials, such as first-hand transcripts that no one else has read - see the examples at the start of this piece - on the human impact of climate change in the here and now, for instance in Somaliland and Kenya. Pupils have also had the “incredibly direct” experience of speaking over Skype to people in the Horn of Africa who bear witness to what is happening - unprecedented droughts causing livelihoods to disappear and forcing people to leave their homeland.

“It’s really important to have those who are impacted most at the front of conversations,” says Watson. “Climate change education in general is not talking about human impact of climate change, and even when it does talk about human impact, it’s divorced - you don’t have the first-hand experiences of people who are being impacted the most.”

Pupils forge links with the Anuak people, for example, a group that Watson and her colleagues are confident have never been talked about extensively in any UK school until now. They learn, by seeing how these people’s lives have been blighted, that climate change is a human-rights issue, not just an environmental one.

As well as interviewing activists and local officials, students pore over a wealth of materials including video, photography and transcripts. Then come the challenges: where do you start, for example, if you have to summarise a complex interview in just 100 words? What does that brevity do to the story? How do stories get sensationalised? And how do you speak for others when it’s not your story to tell?

Ben Seymour, a geography teacher and the IB (International Baccalaureate) Diploma programme coordinator at St Leonards, says students feel emboldened by the programme to persuade others of the immediate dangers of climate change. One student said: “I just want to convince my dad that this is real - I want to be able to win the argument.”

Students from the three schools will eventually use various media - perhaps podcasts, photography and video - to produce accounts of how climate change affects everything from migration to food prices and disaster protection, which will all be brought together in an exhibition in St Andrews.

Regardless of the final outcome of this project, Seymour says students have had a “fantastic opportunity” not only to hear about the impact of the climate emergency on people in parts of the world rarely heard about in the UK, but also to “consider the power of storytelling in spreading a message”.

And how that power is harnessed is crucial to the whole endeavour.

“Our project seeks not only to document stories of human migration in the era of human-caused climate change, but to also raise awareness around how these stories can be told responsibly as well as irresponsibly,” explains Bennett Collins, the University of Andrews PhD student who is the driving force behind the schools’ project.

Students learn about the idea of “accountable” and ethical storytelling. What are the risks, for example, if a journalist drops in briefly to gather material for a story then disappears, having gained only a cursory understanding of the situation and barely got to know the people involved?

This project, instead, encourages constant refinement of stories and ongoing dialogue between the students and the people whose lives they are learning about. Rather than being passive in their own story, and despite being thousands of miles away, those people will have an ongoing say in how they are presented in the final exhibition in a few months’ time.

Collins says some of the most successful parts of the project were when students got space to “vent” about the impact of climate change after learning that those least responsible for it are often the worst affected by it. However, guest instructors - including journalists who have worked for Channel 4, National Geographic and The New York Times - helped to steer that anger away from clichéd representations.

Collins says: “We did want to make sure that they weren’t taking a victimhood lens to this [which can] disempower the people whose stories you’re telling, but also make you feel disempowered by hearing about all these ‘victims’ … when you [instead] see people that are surviving and are fighting, you are likewise more likely to fight with them, rather than just offer them sympathy.”

The project has been “amazing”, says David Beckett, principal teacher of arts and media at Bell Baxter High, and has left students “really inspired and empowered”.

“It has made climate change a very real and very ‘now’ issue for them, broadening their understanding and awareness. It has also lifted the veil to expose the negative manner in which some governments behave [in relation to climate change], which has been a real challenge to our learners.”

Just as politicians’ responses to climate change vary, so can approaches and representations in the media. One of the most valuable lessons came from guest instructor Alice Rowsome, whose recent Channel 4 documentary Growing Up Poor: Britain’s Breadline Kids captured viewers’ attention last month with a hard-hitting social media campaign. Short video stories on Twitter about children having to wear coats to bed or checking fuel consumption before filling a hot water bottle had several million views; the students at the three Fife schools, therefore, saw the importance of homing in on the individual human impact, regardless of whether the issue is poverty or climate change.

IDL ideals

Bruce Robertson, principal teacher of social subjects at Madras College, says: “The big thing [students] got out of it was that they were hearing from experts, not just teachers saying, ‘Here’s what climate change is.’ ”

He adds: “A particular highlight was being able to Skype a journalist [Yahye Xanas] in Somaliland - students were able to interview him about the challenges faced by the people in Somaliland, caused by climate change.

“It made them appreciate that climate change is not an issue for the future but [that] in many parts of Africa, it is directly impacting the lives of millions of people.”

One Madras student, Fatima El-Faleri, described the whole experience as “an eye-opener”. Through hearing the human stories, she says, she has refocused her vague concerns about climate change on to “the impact [it] is having on people”.

Madras senior students - about 15 to 20 were committed enough to come to what was run as an after-school project for six weeks - now plan to share their new insight into climate change with S2 students; Robertson hopes that this will become an annual feature of the school calendar.

The project has, of course, only reached three schools so far. So what advice would Robertson give to schools that want to improve how they teach climate change but do not have the advantage of help from university-based experts on their doorstep?

If ever there was an issue suitable for cross-curricular or interdisciplinary learning (IDL), he believes, it is climate change. IDL can be contrived, says Robertson, but when different school departments join forces on climate change, it feels like the right approach and takes off naturally. There are obvious ways in through the sciences, geography and modern studies, but maths (statistical analysis) and English (persuasive writing) can also play big roles. And, as Robertson points out, the epochal threat of climate change surely demands a bigger-picture approach than that offered by a single school subject.

The project in Fife, certainly, has helped teachers at the three schools to feel more optimistic about the world their students will soon be stepping into as adults.

As Seymour says: “It has encouraged our students to develop international-mindedness, to recognise their common humanity and their shared guardianship of the planet.

“I hope it will give them the motivation to help to create a better and more peaceful world.”

Henry Hepburn is news editor at Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 24 January 2020 issue under the headline “A climate of hope”