Developing Environmental Literacy Through Eco-Documentary-Mediated Climate Change Education

Abstract

Eco-documentaries have been widely used as effective resources to engage young people in discussion and education about climate change. Despite the increasing interest in climate change, secondary school educators are facing significant challenges in the design and implementation of climate change education due to the lack of a comprehensive, widely-applicable educational approach. Drawing on social semiotics, this chapter aims to develop a metalanguage toolkit for eco-documentary-mediated climate change education. The metalanguage toolkit will provide both educators and students multimodal lenses to understand how a wide range of semiotic modalities (e.g., language, image, music, shot editing, camera angle) are carefully selected and configured into a cohesive filmic text, and how the filmic text effectively serves the climate change activist purpose. Findings will suggest an educational path for the development of environmental literacy through the development of multimodal literacies. This chapter will draw more scholarly attention to the in-depth exploration of eco-documentaries.