Climate justice education: From social movement learning to schooling

Abstract

In recent years, the insurgent discourse of climate justice has offered an alternative to the dominant discourse of sustainable development, which has arguably constructed climate change as a global 'post-political' problem, with the effect of erasing its ideological features. However, even climate justice can be considered a contested term, meaning different things to different social actors. Accordingly, this chapter offers a theoretical analysis of the challenges and opportunities for a climate justice education (CJE), which prioritises the distinctive educative and epistemological contributions of social movements, and extends analysis of such movements, by considering how the learning they generate might inform CJE in schools. Regarding the latter, we focus on the Scottish context, both because it represents the context in which our own knowledge claims are grounded, and because the mainstreaming of Learning for Sustainability (LfS) in policy presents an ostensibly sympathetic context for exploring climate justice. We conceptualise CJE as a process of hegemonic struggle, and in doing so, consider recursive 'engagement with'-as opposed to 'withdrawal from'-the state (Mouffe, 2013), via schooling, to be a legitimate dimension of social movement learning.