Classrooms for Climate Justice: Educators’ Use of Images in Justice-Oriented Approaches to Climate Education

In this paper, we reflect on the pedagogic value of images to prompt discussions about climate justice, and thereby engender more democratic learning on climate and interrelated justice issues. Since the publication of Agenda 21 (United Nations, 1992), education has been promoted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and national governments as an indispensable tool for sustainable futures, particularly in the context of climate change. Subsequently, scholars have advocated for more justice-oriented approaches to teaching on and talking about climate change. Justice-oriented approaches can support students and teachers as they engage with the differential impacts and implications of climate change, as they process emotions, and as they reflect on their responses to climate change in the context of emerging citizenship and unequal political opportunities (Bryan, 2022; McGregor & Christie, 2021; Verlie, 2022; Walker, 2024). These are complex but urgent questions and, to date, little research has considered the use of images in generating dialogue and personal and collective reflection around climate justice, and thus in further supporting justice-oriented climate education.

The paper will showcase and discuss images used in research activities for the ‘Classrooms for Climate Justice’ project, conducted by the authors with primary and secondary educators in England and Ireland. In this project, educators first reflected on the opportunities and challenges of raising intersecting justice aspects of climate change they encounter in their teaching. Through image-based focus group discussions inspired by the Inquiry Graphics method (Lackovic, 2020), educators then collectively imagined and individually designed a climate justice pedagogic intervention. In the paper, we will present images used in the focus groups, and discuss how they promoted dialogic peer-peer learning between educators, and how they were used by educators in the course of their climate justice pedagogic interventions.