Lived Experience Of Climate Change Research Articles

The Last Hurrah (and The Long Haul): co-creation of theatre as climate change education

ABSTRACT Meaningful action on climate change requires affective engagement with the human impacts of the problem. The Last Hurrah (and The Long Haul) project was developed using theatrical storytelling as a tool to provoke thought and empathy about the lived experience of climate change. Over a period of 3 years, a company of Acting students and their lecturer worked with faculty and students from a Geography department to explore climate change stories and the physical and human geographies that shape their impacts. This paper reflects on the process, highlighting opportunities and challenges for Geographers to become involved in interdisciplinary teaching and creative engagement as part of a more holistic approach to wicked problems, and explores the impact of the learning experience with the students involved. We conclude that storytelling is profoundly suited to overcoming the psychological barriers that can stand in the way of appreciating and empathizing with the implications for everyday life of an altered climate system. Recommendations are made for future interdisciplinary education projects using creative arts to address global challenges.

Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, by Theodore Martin; Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace, by Jeremy Rosen

Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present, by Theodore Martin; Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary Literary Marketplace, by Jeremy Rosen

The Lived Experience of Climate Change: Complementing the Natural and Social Sciences for Knowledge, Policy and Action

This paper explores the concept of ‘lived experience of limate change’, the complementary challenge it poses to scientific (natural and social science) knowledge, its potential to inform policy, and the methodological challenges of capturing it. We conceptualise lived experience of climate change as evolving knowledge gained over time by individuals and groups through their everyday practices, practices that are in turn framed by proximate impacts of climate-related processes and events, and by broader socio-economic circumstance. The potential of lived experience to complement the sciences and inform policy poses difficult epistemological questions regarding how climate change knowledge is constructed and used. A key further dimension concerns the challenges that confront those who seek to capture it and its integrated, multi-faceted dimensions.

Enhancing online climate change education: distance and conventional university collaboration for a Master's curriculum

This paper analyses the different ways in which both distance and conventional universities engage with learning and teaching. It argues that rather than seeing their roles as institutionally compartmentalised, there is much benefit in delivering online education through an institutional collaboration which develops synergies with a potential to contribute to citizen and professional practitioner empowerment, in this case, for debates about climate change. The example the paper draws on is that of a European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (Erasmus) project ‘The Lived experience of climate change (LECH-e): interdisciplinary e-module development and virtual mobility’. The project brings together five distance and three conventional universities across six EU countries, plus the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU), to create a Master’s curriculum in the area of climate change. It argues that universities across Europe have complementary strengths, both in terms of their disciplinary expertise and the ways in which they engage with students. Understanding the complex, real-world challenge of climate change requires a holistic approach which draws on these complementary strengths through collaborative work.

The lived experience of climate change: expanding the knowledge base through collaborative Master's curriculum in the European Union

Climate change is a complex, real-world, defining challenge of our times where relevant knowledge and action are not confined to the epistemological foundations of any single academic discipline, although many such disciplines can and do contribute. Climate change education, therefore, requires a holistic approach which brings together different academic disciplines. This paper further argues, however, that, while this is necessary, it is not sufficient as the complexity of climate change cannot be captured by academic knowledges alone. An expanded notion of interdisciplinarity is required which integrates academic disciplinary knowledges with experiential knowledges of climate change of both professional practitioners and citizens in their daily lives.

The essential role of expertise on natural resources in climate change Master's education

Future climate change may critically affect natural resources that are essential for basic human needs. Water resources are undoubtedly among the most important resources in this respect. Moreover, water plays an important role in the climate system. These examples illustrate why it is important to pay considerable attention to natural resources in climate change education. The expertise associated with natural resource sectors is inherently multidisciplinary, focusing on real-world problems. Water expertise for example incorporates social, economic, environmental, health, political, institutional, technological and other aspects. In this article, the authors explore the potential contribution of expertise on water issues to climate change education at the Masters level, and the competences with which it is associated. This exploration is framed within a larger European Union Erasmus project ‘The lived experience of climate change: interdisciplinary e-module development and virtual mobility’.

'The lived experience of climate change': creating open educational resources and virtual mobility for an innovative, integrative and competence-based track at Masters level

This paper explores a new integrative approach to climate change education at Masters level. Drawing on the authors' involvement in a European Union Erasmus project, it is argued that the diversity of knowledge(s) on climate change are a source of active/social learning. The wide variety of disciplinary, sectoral and lived experiential (both individual and collective) knowledge(s) are all considered legitimate in this exercise, the aim of which is to construct new interdisciplinary knowledge from their boundary interfaces. We further argue for a corresponding pedagogy based on developing transboundary competences – the ability to engage in social learning and action through communicative engagement across knowledge boundaries. We acknowledge that the challenges for enacting transboundary competence are considerable when it requires mobility across epistemological, even ontological, boundaries. The challenges are further compounded when the communicative engagement across space and time requires virtual mobility which is ICT-enabled. Nevertheless, meeting them is a normative goal, not only for this expanded, integrative approach to climate change education, but also for a global resolution of climate change itself.