Description
Book SynopsisConfronting Climate Crises through Education: Reading Our Way Forward envisions the responsibility of public education to engage a citizenry more prepared to address the challenges of a changing world. Young advocates a paradigm shift that positions ecopedagogy as the central organizing principle of curriculum and assessment design. Each chapter outlines ways literature can serve as a cultural lens for examining the complex patterns of contexts behind our most pressing climate concerns, including potential solutions these patterns may illuminate. A focus on fiction and non-fiction exemplars that can provide such a lens illustrates practical steps educators can take to develop instruction around the immediately relevant environmental crises we are experiencing and to inspire more ecologically conscious, globally-minded problem-solvers prepared to confront them.
Trade ReviewIf educators take Rebecca Young’s advice to harness the power of imaginative world-making and empathetic reading, perhaps we have a chance not only to confront climate crisis but to persuade young people to take tangible steps to repair and protect our environment. A first step would be to recover the original sense of empathy, with Einfühlung, a feeling-into the inanimate world upon which we depend. -- Suzanne Keen, Washington and Lee University
This book could not be more timely or more necessary. The most important questions the planet faces are changing quickly—all of a sudden, survival and fairness seem at least as crucial as that old standby, 'how can we grow bigger?' That world requires a new pedagogy, one whose outlines this volume helps you sense. -- Bill McKibben, Author of Deep Economy
Table of ContentsForeword by John Adams
Introduction: A New Story
Chapter 1: Literature and Empathy: A Rationale for Change
Chapter 2: A Taker-Leaver Paradigm: Cultural Representations in Contemporary Fiction
Chapter 3: Popular Science Fiction and Fantasy: Fostering International Perspectives
Chapter 4: Let’s Share the Table: Building Ecoliterate Communities
Chapter 5: Morality and Environmental Responsibility: An Interdisciplinary Reading of Franzen’s Freedom
Chapter 6: Ecopsychology: Harmonizing Our Paths
Afterword by David W. Orr
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