About the author

Audrey Bryan is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Human Development at Dublin City University. She has written extensively about the climate crisis, including policy guidance on climate change education on behalf of UNESCO as well as numerous internationally peer-reviewed articles about climate change pedagogy. She is also Co-Editor of the Springer Handbook of Children and Youth’s section on Climate. Her most recent work explores the emancipatory and pedagogical potential of complex ecological emotions and the associated question of how best to teach difficult ecological knowledge.  

Chapter blurb

The chapter considers the potential for climate change art and environmental imagery to serve as a springboard for reflecting on—and working through—difficult emotions that arise when learners are confronted with knowledge about their own culpability for the climate crisis. It illuminates art as a pedagogical tool for generating productive questions about what we can do in the face of climate change harms and injustices. It presents a pedagogical model—the Social Ecology of Responsibly Framework (SERF)— to illuminate the complex interconnections between the micro world of everyday encounters and the operations and influence of institutions and the macro forces of economy, culture, media, and ideologies.

Testimonial

Our Swedish Research Council Funded project, A decolonial approach to teaching global justice issues, explores the pedagogical possibilities of decolonial concepts relating to climate change with 15 Upper-secondary schools teachers in Sweden. Teachers have found Dr Bryan’s concept of pedagogy of implication extremely useful to conceptualising and articulating a core tension of teaching about climate crises: taking responsibility for how we are all both part of the problem and the solution as defined by our contexts and avoiding the foreclosures of guilt and apathy. Dr Bryan helps us to articulate how taking a starting point of non-innocence is an invitation to a type of agency that meets the ethical complexities of the problems to which we must all respond, albeit differently. We have found the concept very productive in terms of supporting reflexive practice in teaching about global justice issues. Professor Karen Pashby, Professor of Global Citizenship Education, Manchester Metropolitan University & Louise Sund, Associate Professor of Education, Mälardalen University.