10 Youthful Politics as Pedagogy: Learning With Student Climate Advocates

Philippa Collin

Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), Western Sydney University, Australia

Abstract

There are global efforts to communicate and inspire action on climate change across communities, institutions and industries. As leaders of and participants in global social movements and climate justice organisations, young people are spearheading knowledge-sharing and education for climate action. Yet, students are narrowly constructed as the subjects of both climate and civics education – even when it is recognised that both are severely lacking and/or ineffective (Manning & Edwards, 2014; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020). Coupled with the need for creative and innovative approaches that can address the multifaceted nature and challenges of the climate crisis, this raises the question of who should educate for action on climate change and how?

Drawing on the concept of youthful “politics-as-action” informed by Isin (2002) and Rancière (2010), I consider how student climate activism is a disruptive, generative form of public pedagogy (Biesta, 2012). Comparing and contrasting case studies of student activism and advocacy in the Australian context, I argue that learning from youthful politics offers ways to reimagine education as intergenerational and intersectional public pedagogy for climate justice and democratic renewal.

Keywords

young people, climate justice, learning, public pedagogy, activism

There are global efforts to communicate and inspire action on climate change across communities, institutions and industries. As leaders of and participants in global social movements, climate justice organisations and initiatives, young people are spearheading knowledge-sharing and education for climate action. Yet, students are narrowly constructed as the subjects of both climate and civics education – even when it is recognised that both are severely lacking and/or ineffective (Manning & Edwards, 2014; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020). Coupled with the need for creative and innovative approaches that can address the multifaceted nature and challenges of the climate crisis, this raises the question of who should educate for action on climate change and how?

Since 2019, a team of scholars, young leaders and students have come together to examine who is taking part in the Australian school strike for climate movement,^[1] what actions they are using and how these are being responded to. In examining youth climate activism and advocacy, we have sought to understand and explain the implications of youthful politics for civic and climate education, and for democratic renewal. The research has involved participant observation, social media analysis, live protest surveying, visual ethnography, participatory analysis, and interviewing. As climate activists, parents, artists, curators, students, researchers and youth leaders embedded in a range of contexts, including universities, activist and youth-led organisations, living in what have become urban heat traps, bushfire and flood zones, we are not researchers on but co-constituents of the knowledges, practices and politics we seek to understand.

This chapter draws on that project to engage with young people’s climate activism and advocacy in Australia to rethink the role and forms of pedagogy in a time of climate crisis. First, it introduces how young people’s climate action has shaped ways of learning and acting to address global warming. It then considers how conceptualisations of “politics” and learning as forms of praxis open possibilities for rethinking young people’s various forms of climate activism and advocacy as a generative form of public pedagogy (Biesta, 2012). Drawing on examples of student activism and advocacy in the Australian context, it examines how “youthful politics” are constituted in rights claims, creative interventions in togetherness and action, and dissensus. It concludes that learning from such “youthful politics” offers ways to reimagine education as intergenerational and intersectional public pedagogy for climate justice and democratic renewal.

Youth Climate Advocacy and Activism

For more than four decades, students and young people have been at the forefront of environmentalism, calls for sustainability and action on climate change (Bessant et al., 2024). Indeed, children and young people’s political activism did not start with the modern climate movement. In Australia, the history of “protest” and campaigns to protect Country is at least as old as Indigenous resistance to the British invasion and the ongoing struggle against the destructive forces of colonisation (Collin & Matthews, 2021). In their communities and organisations, children and young people have always been a part of these efforts to secure justice for Country. In their own words, they remind us that there cannot be climate justice without First Nations justice (Shakespeare, Catanzaro & Brooker, 2024).

In 2018, students in the Victorian town of Castlemaine were worrying about climate change. Living in families and a community keen to promote sustainability and greater action to halt global warming, and inspired by Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future strikes, 3 students organised a group of mainly 14-year-olds to hold local strikes leading to the first national “School Strike 4 Climate” (SS4C) on 30 November 2018 (Collin & McCormack, 2019; Bessant et al, 2023). The SS4C movement in Australia (and around the world) grew with protests in the week of 17 September 2019, when 80,000 students and their supporters rallied in the Domain, Sydney (on 20 September 2018), joined by an estimated 350k around Australia and 7.6m internationally. Over the subsequent years, online events, global strike days and local events have been held to call for urgent action on climate change. Despite the public health orders during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent escalation of other intersecting issues, including gender-based violence, First Nations justice and sovereignty, and wars in Ukraine and Gaza – all of which have stirred youth and public action – students have continued to organise and advocate for action on climate change.

Underpinning the rise of the School Strike 4 Climate has been a deliberate strategy by students and youth-led organisations over two decades to use educative approaches to build a youth movement for climate justice (Hilder & Collin, 2021). In doing so, they have generated online and offline peer education as well as public events and actions designed to support learning on climate change. In classrooms, on social media and in the strikes young people have produced what Rancière would call a significant interruption to the “natural order” of domination by those who are usually excluded from the political sphere (Rancière, 2004, p. 11). For Rancière, politics is what happens when “the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part” (2004, p. 11). In protests and other forms of climate advocacy and action, including speech-making, strategic litigation, legislation, and direct action young people are claiming “the right to have rights” (Bessant et al., 2023; Collin et al., 2023).

However, this claim does not go unanswered. While many have celebrated students’ strikes, the challenge of recognising and activating youth climate advocacy and activism for renewing democracy is epitomised by a now infamous quote in 2018 by then PM, Scott Morrison:

“…we do not support our schools being turned into parliaments.”

“What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools.”

(Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, The Guardian, 26 November 2018)

While the federal government in Australia has changed, the focus of much media and political commentary has been on ‘appropriate’ youth engagement in democracy and contemporary processes of political socialisation and why they should be in school – and largely ignoring their substantive concerns and calls for policy to arrest climate change. To think our way out of the politics of youth, we need to rethink politics itself.

Learning With “Youthful Politics”

Part of the reason why former – and even current politicians in Australia – think that young people belong in schools “learning” and not on streets “doing” is that deficit concepts of students “as becoming” and normative understandings of politics remain dominant (Collin, 2015). As in many Western democracies, civics education and the “health” of democracy has come to be measured in terms of knowledge and compliance with current institutional arrangements and with consensus politics (Collin, 2015; Pickard, 2019). Legacy politics is thus a combination of status (as Western liberal rights and responsibilities) and habitus (Bourdieu, 1994) – or, the institutionalised routines, patterns of thought and conduct that shape the governance of society.

This is despite a significant body of political participation research that shows that young people – and many older people – are politically engaged and participating, but with new repertoires (think online campaigns), new actors (such as celebrity UN Goodwill Ambassadors) and targeting their activism beyond government (e.g. targeting banks that finance new coal mines) (Collin, 2015; Vromen, 2003; Sloam & Henn, 2019). Rather than continuing to argue for a view of young people as “active” participants, instead, we should flip the lens and work at the generative edges of “youthful politics”. As defined by Catanzaro and Collin, “A “youthful politics” lens proposes re-theorisation of the political through critical engagement with young people’s views and practices” (Catanzaro & Collin, 2021, p. 11). Thus, while recognising children and young people’s as social and political agents, within contemporary democracy they remain the “part that has no part” (Ranciere 2004, p. 11). However, when they make themselves visible by inserting themselves into spaces as citizens with views, or as educators, or as litigants, they are being political and are enacting “acts of citizenship” (Isin, 2008).

Nevertheless, in society, students are still positioned as the subjectsof climate and civics education—even when these are acknowledged as ineffective (Rousell & Cutter-MacKenzie-Knowles, 2020). Following a systematic review of international research on climate change education, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Rousell (2019) find that the dominant approaches are top-down with a focus on scientific knowledge and cognitive understanding, formal curriculum, (individual) behaviour change or mitigation/adaptation (Rousell & Cutter-MacKenzie-Knowles, 2020, p. 202). Moreover, they note that digital/ communication-based, child-framed, participatory, and creative educational approaches are nascent (Rousell & Cutter-MacKenzie-Knowles, 2020, p. 202). Considering this, and given the demand for creative approaches addressing the multifaceted climate crisis, raises the question: who should educate on climate change, and how?

From Learning for Climate Action to Public Pedagogy

If “youthful politics” proposes re-theorisation of the political – what should we make of “pedagogy”? How can pedagogy be rethought through critical engagement with young people’s views and practices? While there is good reason to remain interested in what happens in schools and the opportunities for a better climate and civic learning in formal educational settings, youthful politics expands the prospects for learning. Rather than approaching learning as a regime (of education), learning can be concerned with openness, plurality and inclusivity. We understand education as a broad and inclusive form of togetherness and learning, that can happen across all ages in public spaces (Biesta, 2012: 694). According to Biesta, learning can be focused on a concern for “publicness” or ‘publicity’: that is, a concern for the public quality of human togetherness and thus for the possibility of actors and events to become public. (Biesta, 2012, p. 693).

Thus, reading through Biesta, learning for climate action that is not about “education”, but about “becoming public”, we can identify 3 key enablers to focus on:

1. Becoming public is a claim to the right to have rights.
2. Becoming public is about the achievement of a form of human togetherness. In the language of Hannah Arendt, through human togetherness, action is possible and freedom can appear (Biesta, 2012, p. 693).
3. Becoming public is to “disrupt”. In this interpretation, the educational agent ‒ the public pedagogue ‒ is neither an instructor nor a facilitator but rather someone who interrupts the taken for granted routines, values, knowledges and expectations in society (Biesta, 2006). Such interruptions take the form of what, after Rancière, we might think of as “dissensus”. Dissensus is not to be understood as the “opposition of interests or opinions [but is] the production, within a determined, sensible world, of a given that is heterogeneous to it” (Rancière, 2003, p. 226).

So what might this look like in practice? Below are three examples from the Australian context to test the idea of youthful politics as intergenerational public pedagogy for climate justice and democratic renewal.

Claiming Rights

• platform for collaboration (connecting). Creative approaches allow various actors to come together to create playful and unexpected engagements, creating multidisciplinary learning opportunities for facilitators as well as participants.
• a process (making) allows for open-ended ways to engage with the issue; this elevates concerns and pressures of outcome and instead focuses on the “doing” (Bentz, 2020, p. 1600).
• a platform for communication(looking). Using visual communication to make artefacts or things allows diverse (and sometimes shocking, funny or intense) messages to be delivered using a variety of emotional devices. This also includes creative activities such as performance and dance routines, which create organic spaces for participants to watch and move together with shared interests, guided by creative expression.
• a facilitator for conversation and dialogue (participating and listening). Creative activities such as workshops and facilitated conversations allow participants to listen, participate and engage in discussions, guided by creative expression and prompts.
• a mechanism for transformation and change (open-ended exchange and learning). The way that creativity is infused in each educative activity allows for open-ended learning experiences that facilitate change.

(Catanzaro et al., in press)

Dissensus

Biesta reminds us that to “stage” dissensus is to introduce an incommensurable element ‒ an event, an experience and an object ‒ that can act both as a test and as a reminder of publicness (Biesta, 2006). Children and young people ‒ supported by adult allies ‒ are claiming rights and making “adult” spaces public: online, in conference rooms, courts and houses of parliament.

For example, there have been a number of cases around the world where young people have been lead litigants in cases against Ministers and Government and arguing that Ministers (and governments) have a duty of care to children now – and those yet to be born – which must be considered in decisions associated with the Environment Act (Slobodian, 2019; Gordon, 2024). While ultimately these cases were overturned, they have catalysed debate and discussion and led to new novel actions by Australian young people – such as working with Independent Senator David Pocock to put a bill to the parliament to amend the Environment Act and legislate a Duty of Care.

By leading these actions, young people are entering institutions and processes from which they are typically excluded. By introducing their “incommensurable” selves, they are actively testing the boundaries and expectations of publicness; they are making it. As one of the litigants in the case of Sharma v Minister for the Environment put it:

The eight of us are just the tip of the proverbial melting iceberg. This class action was filed on behalf of all young people around the world and we received almost 2,000 messages of support from young people in 39 countries on almost every continent. I’m proud to have represented these young people, especially those at the intersection of the frontlines of climate impacts and the vulnerabilities of being a person of colour, living rurally and regionally, or being disabled. (Ava Princi, age 17, 2021, transcript #9 cited in Collin et al., 2024, p. 64).

Youthful Politics as Pedagogy?

Understood as “becoming public”, youth climate advocacy and actions are not separate from those of other social and non-human actors. Indeed, student climate action has always emerged through forms of intergenerational solidarity and tensions. In recent decades, these intergenerational relations have been central to the development of local and international networks, strategies to challenge laws, community and industry practices to advance climate justice, as well as efforts to diminish, constrain or discredit the efforts of young people (Bessant & Lohmeyer, 2021; Collin & Matthews, 2021; Lobo et al., 2024).

Taking on Biesta’s provocation that there is profound democratic potential in public pedagogy and that such pedagogy is not about finding ways to educate “for” or educate “by” young people but to enact a form of human togetherness in which action is possible, and freedom can appear, there are many opportunities for learning with the youthful politics of student climate activists. At a time when creativity, collaboration and dialogue matter more than ever to our capacity as a society to respond to global warming, (re)thinking “with” young people emerges as both a viable and necessary option to addressing the dual crisis of climate change and contemporary democracy.

Students in classrooms, on the streets, online and in courtrooms and museums are expressing their concerns and their hopes for climate justice “with others”. Many of them feel they need to shout to be heard. Sadly, many now feel that the effort to be heard is not paying off. However, there are many examples where young people, in coming together with adult allies, are instituting forms of public pedagogy which are both a source of hope and a call to action for the rest of us. Rather than asking how we teach or even how we support young people to educate one another, there is significant potential in learning from youthful politics as intergenerational public pedagogy for climate justice and democratic renewal.

Author Note

Philippa Collin https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0015-4213

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Philippa Collin. Email: p.collin@westernsydney.edu.au.

Acknowledgments

This chapter draws on research supported by funding from the Australian Research Council (DP230101704). I would like to acknowledge colleagues and young people involved in the New Possibilities Project: Professor Judith Bessant, A/Professor Michelle Catanzaro, A/Professor Faith Gordon, Dr Luigi di Martino, Professor Rob Watts, Dinusha Soo and Varsha Yajman. I also acknowledge the young people who care about addressing climate change, and the young people who identify as leaders and participants in the climate justice movement: for their vision, courage and leadership.

SDG Alignment

Goal 4: Quality education

Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities

Goal 13: Climate action

Cite This Chapter

Attribution

Research Integrity Statement

This publication reports research involving human participants. Ethics approval was granted by the Western Sydney University HREC (approval number: H13420). Informed consent was obtained from all participants.

The author declares no known competing financial or non-financial interests that could have influenced the content of this publication.

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