Context/Rationale

Context

The critical and frontline voices at COP26 and the People’s Summit affirm what Indigenous peoples and climate scientists have been warning of for decades: we have already entered the period of ecological catastrophe and biodiversity collapse, unequally but urgently impacting populations and ecosystems. It can credibly be argued that CSSE will cease to function in another 50 years if our society and education systems refuse to change the ways we live, learn, and relate to the natural world. This context of cascading collapse is of unequal creation and impact, and preventing the most deadly futures will demand political commitment for unprecedented transformations. Political commitment is a profoundly educational question that has yet to be seriously taken up in that it implies profound transformation in ways of knowing and learning. As Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017) note, “the story we tell ourselves about environmental crises, the story of humanity’s place on the earth and its presence within geological time determines how we understand how we got here, where we might like to be headed, and what we need to do” (p. 764).

Situating the Theme

This pre-conference stems from a call from/to history teachers for a curriculum of climate crisis (McGregor et.al., 2021). It builds on the call to attune education to a relational, ecological, and ethical future orientation that meets the challenge of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Plantationocene (Davis & Todd, 2017; Moore, 2017; Haraway, 2015) and crisis of colonial modernity as a multidimensional phenomenon requiring adaptation in ways of understanding, being, and relating to ourselves, our human systems, and our more-than-human web of life.

There are two theoretical commitments underpinning the planning of this event. The first situates climate change as one part of the interconnected crises of colonial modernity (including settler colonialism, extractive racial capitalism, and heteropatriarchal governance). This contextualizes colonial modernity within longer histories, traditions, and systems in order to understand and respond to this moment (Whyte, 2021). The second centres Indigenous knowledge and cultural systems of reciprocity, respect, responsibility, and right relations as offering direction for restoring relations and building collective and individual stamina in turning towards, not away, from these crises (GTDF, 2020). In seeking to attune history education to a relational, ecological, and ethical future orientation we turn to scholarship in other fields which are oriented towards teaching similar outcomes–including, but not limited to–Indigenous studies, decolonial and decolonizing education, environmental history, and climate change education. We suggest that the challenge in education is not just teaching about climate variation over time and its consequences but recognizing that climate change is a multidimensional phenomenon requiring adaptation in ways of being and understanding ourselves.

Conference Aims

We invite interested educators and researchers to participate in and contribute to our upcoming pre-conference workshop on the meaning and responsibility of education in the face of colliding crises. This pre-conference workshop has been planned as a space for teacher educators, educational theorists, and researchers to map out ways of thinking about this educational problem for Canadian history teachers, to organize and respond to the fullness of this challenge. The overarching goal of this conference is to build strength and focus our conversations as a community of history educators. Specifically, the conference aims to build networks to continue the work of generating themes and frameworks that can be adapted to provincial and territorial curriculum, directing research and professional development, and generating teaching resources.

References

IPCC, 2021. Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J. B. R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press.

Davis, H., & Todd, Z. (2017). On the importance of a date, or, decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(4), 761-780.

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective (2020). Preparing for the end of the world as we know it. Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/preparing-end-world-we-know-it/.

Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental humanities, 6(1), 159-165.

McGregor, van Kessel, Karn, & Pind. (2021, June 1). Urgent Call: History and Social Studies Teachers for Climate Change Education. CSSE.

Moore, J. W. (2017). The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis. The Journal of peasant studies, 44(3), 594-630.

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