Abstract
To facilitate children and young people’s constructive climate change engagement, participatory methods stand out for their potential to empower agency and action. This on-going study is co-creating, implementing and evaluating a school-based intervention that facilitates young people’s climate change awareness, agency and action through photovoice in Tanzania, East Africa. In the co-creation process, students are collaborating with teachers in designing their own learning experience, with an emphasis on student perspectives, thus, embracing the constructivist learning theory. Photovoice is supplementing classroom-based climate change education with action-based opportunities to mitigate students’ sense of agency, action and promote their empowerment. Photovoice a form of participatory action research puts cameras into the hands of young people to capture images representing their lived realities and reflect on their experiences, express themselves creatively. The initial results from project trends reveals increased knowledge and connection to climate change which leads to youths’ increased motivation and willingness to engage in pro-environmental behaviors. By qualitatively examining children’s photovoice discussions from a tenth-week of actual program implementation on how children make connections between their own lives and climate change through photovoice. Findings suggests that photovoice helps children and young people to learn about, care about, and take action on climate change. Moreover, these processes ignites children’s enjoyment of the program and engagement in collective meaning-making during group-based photovoice discussions. In conclusion, as climate change intensifies, photovoice can be an important pedagogical approach and enjoyable experience for children and young people that simultaneously facilitates their learning, effective engagement, and agentic action.
Presenters
Nyerere JacksonStudent, PhD Candidate-Climate Change Studies, Ardhi University/Copenhagen University, Tanzania
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
CLIMATE CHANGE AGENCY AND ACTION, CO-CREATION, PHOTOVOICE, PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH
