Re-thinking Pedagogies for Climate Change Activism: Cognitive, Behaviorist, Technological, or Cultural?

In the 50 years since the stark warnings put forth in classical works like The Limits of Growth (1972), we have failed to achieve environmental sustainability. This underscores the inadequacies of cognitive, behaviorist, and technological solutions that have been pursued over the past three decades. Young people are most acutely aware of this failure and our precarious future, as evidenced in the School Strikes for Climate movement. And yet, despite the catastrophic severity of the problem, the ways educational scholars and practitioners alike attempt to (re)imagine the future remain limited. Much scholarly work is still aimed at raising awareness, incentivizing certain behaviors, searching for technological breakthroughs, or calls to greater “agency.” Meanwhile, concerned teachers add climate-related topics and encourage paper bags, shorter showers, meatless Mondays, and student activism. Missing from our current imagination is culture, in particular how changing our dominant modes of self (self-construal) is a prerequisite for any significant, lasting move toward sustainability. In this chapter, we sketch out a body of emerging work – both theoretical and empirical – suggesting the necessity of a cultural shift for achieving sustainability. Our argument is that the on-going inability to limit climate change suggests that the problem is primarily cultural, and given that it is cultural, one important way to address it is through education, albeit through educational ideas that differ from the contemporary mainstream.