Student’s Material-inscription of Place-based Climate Solutions

Climate change education in school has been criticized for the lack of relevance to students and opportunities for brainstorming collective solutions. A place-based approach seeks to draw student’s relevance to local climate change issues, in which students represent their solutions to local issues through representing results from their material investigations through different modes, including the visual, written and verbal modes. Based on this approach, we designed two one-day workshops to facilitate students in Hong Kong to develop solutions to climate change by a place-based education approach. There was a total of 48 students from over 10 primary and secondary schools, with 24 students taking part in one workshop. Drawing on mapping and multimodal discourse analysis, we characterized how students utilised various modes to communicate their place-based climate solutions. Students transformed their material experiences into new representations of climate solutions relevant to their community. The results highlighted important implications regarding design of curriculum materials and instruction in place-based climate education.