Global Climate Education and Its Discontents

This innovative and practical book offers pedagogical tools to show how drama can be used in educational settings to advance a relational, action-oriented, interdisciplinary, and creative climate education attuned to the social and emotional effects of the climate emergency. Based on a six-year ethnographic research study taking place with teachers, artists, community leaders, and young people globally, and taking its lead from the following provocation – can performance become a site for new imaginaries for socio-ecological justice? – the book explores the unique conceptual and pedagogical ‘discontents’ of climate education across geographically and culturally distinct sites of learning. It also examines how artful engagement through drama pedagogies can open up more collective, critical, and hopeful forms of thinking and being.

The book is divided into two sections. The first part of the book, Local engagements and encounters, consists of chapters that conduct an in-depth appraisal of the local artistic work from each site, examining how matters of socio-ecological justice are given fresh urgency and complexity through the application of performance as pedagogy. The second part of the book, Pedagogical and artistic innovations, offers substantive praxis chapters on the drama-based pedagogical methods employed in the research. In these chapters, the world-building capacities of theatre-making offer up new, performative pedagogical orientations to the climate emergency beyond those of critique.

Global Climate Education and Its Discontents: Using Drama to Forge a New Way is valuable reading for scholars interested in the ontological and epistemological dimensions of the climate emergency, especially within and across the following fields: drama, theatre and performance studies, applied theatre and drama education, educational research, and children/childhood and youth studies. The book also invites a readership of teachers and teacher-educators who are interested in applying drama pedagogies in the classroom to explore matters of socio-ecological justice and the climate crisis.

Kathleen Gallagher is Director of the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and Distinguished Professor. Gallagher studies theatre as a powerful medium for expression by young people of their experiences and understandings.

Christine Balt is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research takes place at the intersection of theatre, pedagogy, ecology, and collective well-being in the lives of young people living in cities.