Schools must embrace conflict to teach climate change, study finds
A new research collection argues that education institutions should stop treating climate change as a settled problem and instead harness disagreement and emotional responses as teaching tools. The shift could reshape how policymakers design climate literacy programs and prepare students for decision-making in a polarized world.
Originaltitel: Education and resistance in a time of climate emergency: Affect, aesthetics, and conflict
This special issue examines education and resistance in the context of the climate emergency, foregrounding the interconnected roles of affect, aesthetics, and conflict. Emerging from the 6th symposium of the Studies in Conflict, Culture, and the Political in Education (SCAPE) research network, convened in 2023 at Maynooth University (Ireland), the collection comprises seven articles and one provocation essay, each seeking to respond to the increasingly tangible consequences of climate change. The contributions situate education within the material, political, and existential conditions produced by climatic and ecological disruption, while critically engaging the contested interpretations through which this crisis and its emergency are understood in a polarized world. Rather than treating the climate emergency as a singular or consensual object of concern, the issue foregrounds dissensus, relationality, and aesthetics as constitutive dimensions of educational thought and practice. Conflict is thus approached not as a problem to be resolved but as a potential generative force within education, requiring attention to sensory-affective, embodied-aesthetic, and more-than-human relations. A unifying thread across the contributions is a reworking of resistance as a pedagogical practice grounded in attentiveness and gentleness, oriented against hegemonic powers and sensitive to the indeterminacy and relationality that characterizes subjectivity. Collectively, the intellectual engagements of this issue offer plural perspectives on how education might cultivate new ways of imagining, inhabiting, and sharing worlds under conditions of ecological precarity, opening pedagogical space for uncertainty, dissensus, and renewed judgment.