CLIMATE RESILIENCE WITH YOUTH: ANN RICHARDS SCHOOL PROJECT The Project The Team Curriculum What is the impact of using drama and the arts to increase climate literacy and resilience in youth in secondary education? Climate literacy begins with having a vocabulary to understand the actual impacts of climate change in our local contexts. Climate change anxiety is rising, especially in young people. Schools lack pedagogical methods and climate change literacy to effectively respond to students’ increasing eco-anxiety and infowhelm in relationship to the climate crisis. WHO UT Austin’s Drama for Schools, Planet Texas 2050, and the Ann Richards School (ARS). WHEN June 2024-May 2025. WHAT ARS students (7th graders and high-schoolers), ARS 7th grade teachers and administrators partnered with UT Austin faculty and students to create the Student Teacher Learning Community (STLC). The STLC co-designed and facilitated new arts-integrated project-based learning units in every 7th grade classroom at Ann Richards that explored climate/environmental resilience using local data and equity frameworks from UT’s Planet Texas. Then, the students of the STLC hosted a 1/2 day festival where the entire 7th grade presented the outputs of the project to the entire 6th grade and invited guests at the school. The project concluded with the STLC presenting their research findings at the Planet Texas 2050 Research Symposium at UT Austin. Across the project, the STLC researched how the arts can prompt self-expression and reflection about positive connections to the natural world; spark and mediate dialogue about the ways that climate change is not just an environmental issue, but a complex challenge with social, economic and personal implications; and, imagine and enact new possibilities to create change in our own lives, at school, and in our local community. HOW The STLC used a three-phase sequence to CLARIFY, INCUBATE, and AMPLIFY. This iteration of the project engaged students, teachers, administrators, and DFS partners alike in Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). (DFS launched our first climate-related project at Ann Richards in Fall 2023.) Researching Resiliency, Resiliency As Research “Resilience* is the art of learning to live together as though our futures really mattered.” -“The Art of Resilience, The Resilience of Art” (2017) Drama for Schools is partnering with Planet Texas 2050 to better understand how the arts can be used to support climate literacy and resiliency in K-12 education. The climate crisis transcends our ability to imagine its consequences. The arts are a language with multimodal efficacy. Artists’ methods broaden possibilities, are non-reductive, and can attend to both humanistic and natural concerns. As such, we use the arts as resilience and we research resilience through the arts. Research in drama interventions into the climate crisis with youth argue that the arts can help students and teachers to engage with climate and environmental equity, content, and complex histories through healing-centered work because drama engages vulnerability, listening and the body as a site for making meaning and imagining possible environmental futures. *Our use of “resilience” arose out of many conversations. Resilience as a term holds a complicated history, often used to place the onus of responsibility on an individual rather than problematic systems. We seek to problematize it and hold its complexity while using it in the context of systems. How do we reclaim and define that with our partners? climate literacy: an understanding of how the climate system worksclimate resiliency: our ability to prepare for and respond to climate change What is Resilience? Hear ARS students definitions of resilience. Audio Transcript “Taking action and standing up for yourself, and standing up for others.” “Standing up for something big.” “It can just be anybody, but you can’t always tell, because resilience isn’t necessarily something you can see.” “And like, being an example to others, and like, staying–like just believing in yourself.” “Part of resiliency is also building that network, so that when one person is tired or doesn’t have the energy to do it, that others are there to help hold them up… and be there to help carry on.” “Having the words to defend yourself is really important.” “… through education, knowing like, you can have a voice to really speak up.” “I’d say that resilience is both the adaptation and balance of a system, and the balance and adaptation in creation of the systems or of other projects…I feel there’s a certain resilience in the decision-making process, of designing, because not everything works–not everything can work–you have to kind of navigate possibility and uncertainty. And there was resilience in maintaining our cohesion while we did that.” Resilience is Changing Education. Hear from teachers and students in our final STLC meeting as they reflect on the impact of collaborating to improve education. Audio Transcript “The feeling in the class, classroom…I’ve noticed like, in class, there’s kind of a different dynamic in class, and it’s really nice to see that.” “What we were just saying like, I feel like when we’re in the classroom, it’s like the teacher’s the boss, and then we’re just like, students. But here, it’s like we’re all kind of like the same level.” “I think this project kind of opened a new part of my brain I didn’t really know I had. Because it gave me a perspective of things where it made me think more, and I think it challenged me more than any other school I would have gone to, and it expanded like my knowledge of how my peers think and what they’re interested in, and how I say things, and my vocab, and how I can take action and be resilient to not just climate change but to other experiences that are affecting nature and the world.” “I hope you see that, like your voices matter so much.” “I think it’s kind of cool that this feels like not school.” “Yeah I know!” “That in itself is its own great thing.” Resilience is Connection. Hear from teachers and students in our final STLC meeting as they reflect on the impact of connection. Audio Transcript “This project connects to ARS and classes because it shows that there is so much to do for the environment to make a big impact.” “It connects by all the hard work we put into it. This wasn’t easy and not all our other assignments are easy, but we were able to persevere just like we do in regular classes.” “It connects because it teaches us to help others and to use courage.” “It connects to me and to ARS because it really shows how much we try to help our environment and really shows how we want a change to make the world a better place.” “It connects because there are so many ways to advocate whether its facts or art.
