Alfredo Jornet, University of Girona, Spain
Youth’s raising their voice to call for urgent and definite action towards more just and sustainable futures is a recognizable feature in the social imaginary of contemporary environmentalism. Yet, in our research, we have observed that students often feel detached, admit “not caring much” about the issue, and feel disempowered and hopeless before a problem they see as too broad, too complex, and disconnected from their everyday life and possibilities to act. In this keynote, we discuss how this situation is partly due to a conception of the climate crisis as a learning object that is “out there” that needs to be grasped, rather than as something that is within, present and lived through by everyone, everywhere—though not equally so. An educational research program is proposed that explores the ways in which the climate crisis can be approached as traversing many aspects of our everyday life, and how science education and research practices may be transformed accordingly with the aim of supporting students and their communities in becoming implicated subjects in this historical moment of crisis. Empirical work in three contexts is presented: (i) open schooling initiatives in which schools collaborate with out-of-school partners to address local sustainability challenges in Norway; (ii) science education projects in marginalized contexts in Spain exploring local environmental injustices; and (iii) the cooperation between scientists, engineers, farmers and indigenous communities building agroecological initiatives seeking peace in post-conflict areas in Colombia.