Adopting a languaging approach for teaching about the climate crisis in English language arts

Abstract

Purpose

This paper posits the need for English language arts (ELA) teachers to foster students’ use of languaging about their relations with ecosystems and peers, leading to their engaging in collective action to critique and transform status-quo systems impacting the climate crisis.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper reviews the current theory of languaging theory and research that focuses on the use of languaging to enact relations with ecosystems and others and voice emotions for transforming communities and reducing emissions contributing to climate change.

Findings

This review of languaging theory/research leads to identifying examples of teachers having students critique the use of languaging constituting status quo energy and community/transportation systems, respond to examples of characters using languaging in literary texts, using languaging in discussing or writing about the need to address climate change, critiquing languaging in media promoting consumption, using media to interact with audiences and using languaging through engaging in role-play activities.

Originality/value

This focus on languaging in ELA classrooms is a unique perspective application of languaging theory, leading students to engage in collective, communal action to address the climate crisis.

Citation

Beach, R. (2024), "Adopting a languaging approach for teaching about the climate crisis in English language arts", English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/ETPC-05-2024-0067

Using fossil fuels in the past 30 years, humans have added 50% of carbon monoxide emissions, leading to a climate crisis resulting in increased heat, sea rise, droughts, extreme weather events and other impacts (Rosten and Bloomberg, 2023). Much of the climate crisis derives from the operation of status quo transportation, agriculture and housing/buildings systems requiring fossil fuels (Beach, 2023b), leading to the need to transform these systems to reduce emissions causing the climate crisis (Saito, 2024).

While there is an increased focus on addressing the climate crisis in English Language Arts (ELA) (Beach et al., 2017; 2023a; 2023b; Siperstein et al., 2016; Webb et al., 2024; Woodard and Schutz, 2024), unfortunately, students often spend little time in school addressing the climate crisis in ELA (Damico and Baildon, 2022). While 65% of ELA teachers in a national survey indicate climate change is in their curriculum, only 41% teach climate change (Dropkin et al., 2022).

Adopting a languaging perspective for engaging students in collective actions

For teaching about climate change, ELA teachers draw on the National Council of Teachers of English resolution that teaching about climate change “demands all the tools of language and communication, including the ability to tell compelling stories about the people and conflicts at the heart of this global discussion” (National Council of Teachers of English, 2019, np.). This resolution implies the value of languaging to address climate change through enacting relations with others and ecosystems. However, even if teachers do so, the question arises as to whether they employ:

[…] the “languages that will allow them to recognize, articulate, and act on a widely shared sense of discontent? Will they find those languages in marketing class? On television or in People magazine? None of these outlets has a memory, and therefore, none can preserve genuine alternatives to a status quo that seems less and less capable of keeping its promise” (Spellmeyer, 2012, p. 584).

Using languaging for enacting relations with others

One approach to focusing on language in ELA classrooms involves framing language as languaging actions to enact and foster relations with others (Beach and Beauchemin, 2019; Beach and Bloome, 2019; Bakhtin, 1984). Languaging theory fits with a literacy study that looks at the importance of using social skills to have meaningful conversations for critical literacy (Aukerman, 2013). It also draws on social literacy theories related to students using language to enact social identities and relations to critique status-quo practices (Gee, 2008). In employing languaging, students also explicitly show how they think about a topic or issue to reflect on their lived-world experiences with their peers (Rymes, 2014), leading to their critical inquiry about status-quo systems (Lewison et al., 2014). Students may also employ languaging through their writing to achieve rhetorical uptake related to making a change in status-quo communities (Borsheim and Petrone, 2006).

Consistent with this focus on social literacies (Gee, 2008), languaging theory also draws on Bakhtin’s (1984) notion that the meaning of language derives from the “in-between” for enacting relations with others through languaging as actions (Bertau, 2014; Bloome and Beauchemin, 2016). The concept of languaging involves using language as a verb—as social actions for enacting relations with others (Linell, 2009). As Bakhtin noted, “truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person; it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 110). Through languaging, students are learning to build social relations to envision and enact change through collective action (Eide and Kunelius, 2021; Gonzalez et al., 2022), the focus of this report. “There is not the world first, and then language that represents it; rather […] the world of objects, persons, and language are on the same plane—all are signs that interact and form new relations” (Leander and Rowe, 2006, p. 435). This report posits that students benefit from sharing their perceptions and concerns about climate change by engaging in languaging about the climate crisis.

Teachers can have students engage in languaging to share their emotions of resilience, agency, hope and optimism in ways that provide, attract and acquire social support from peers and adults (Ojala, 2012; Verlie, 2022). Doing so leads students to adopt an optimistic stance related to hope for potential change in the future as an incentive to push to transform status-quo systems (Corbett, 2021). “Without hope, there is no aspiration, no ambition, and, ultimately, there are no efforts for change” (Römhild, 2023, p. 15), based on a value “that we truly share, by connecting that value to climate, and most importantly, by inspiring each other to act together to fix this problem” (Hayhoe, 2023).

Using languaging for enacting relations with the “more than human” ecosystems

In addition to students employing languaging to enact relations with humans, they are also employing languaging for enacting relations with the “more than human” ecosystems constituted by forests, land, water, plants and species ecosystems impacted by climate change (Brown, 2022; Milstein, 2024; Perry, 2024). To understand the meaning of “ecosystems,” students could study the use of languaging associated with the use of the word “eco” in ecology, which derives from the Greek word “‘oikos,” which means “‘the place of dwelling’” in nature (Yi, 2019, p. 187). Similarly, the word “Sawubona” in African culture refers to the value of their connections with nature (Caldwell and Atwijuka, 2018).

The loss of Indigenous languages reflects the diminution of Indigenous connections to biocultural diversity related to their local ecosystems, in contrast to Western languages that distinguish between humans and ecosystems (Nelson et al., 2023). Members of the Native American Kurak tribe employ languaging to justify their resistance to colonialism based on their collective, reciprocal connection with the environment as the basis for survival (Ford and Norgaard, 2020, p. 47).

Students could also examine how Indigenous peoples employ languaging to define their intimate relations with lands or regions as “dwellings” (Tynan, 2021) as contrasted with the word “territory,” related to colonial control of their same lands or regions, resulting in Indigenous peoples losing control of those lands or regions (Gokey and Sierra, 2023; Jeong and Silverman, 2023). In one study, students drew on Indigenous narratives about their affective connections with water to generate their own stories, valuing the need for clean, accessible water as essential for life (Nxumalo and Villanueva, 2019).

Engaging students in languaging in English language arts to address the climate crisis

Adopting a languaging perspective for teaching about climate change moves from a traditional instructional focus analysis of language usage and grammar in ELA classrooms to also having students employ languaging to create and enact relations with others for engaging in collective actions to address the climate crisis (Linell, 2009).

This raises the question of how ELA teachers can foster students’ use of languaging to enact relations with peers to foster collective action to address the climate crisis (Snell and Lefstein, 2018; Verlie, 2022). ELA teachers can also draw on an “inside-out” instructional framework that “deconstructs separations between inside classrooms and outside worlds, between university and place, humanity and nature, body and environment, self and other, etc.” (Milstein et al., 2017, p. 47).

Students can engage in languaging based on their connections with their peers and communities (Flottum, 2017; CUT West, 2022) to collaboratively address adaptation and mitigation practices in their schools and local communities (Beach, 2023a; Marks et al., 2015). For example, based on their difficulties with the lack of mass transportation options in their suburban community requiring a dependency on cars, students may organize with their peers to interact with their local politicians to promote the need for more mass transit options. A meta-analysis of 178 peer-reviewed studies found that having students employ languaging to connect with their local communities helped students apply their knowledge about climate change to engage in action (Bhattacharya et al., 2021).

In the following section, I draw on research on how ELA teachers can engage students in languaging for each of the five following sections: critiquing the use of language promoting uses of fossil fuel, responding to characters languaging in literature, sharing talk and writing about experiences in ecosystems, proposing the need for action and analyzing the use of languaging in media as well as producing media for engaging audiences.

Critiquing key concepts for languaging about climate change

One of the primary concepts underlying the justification of the value of continuing fossil fuel production is the languaging of economic growth justifying continued consumption and the use of fossil fuel essential for that consumption (Helne and Hirvilammi, 2015; Phillips and Finn, 2020). The need for growth requiring fossil fuels has resulted in 57 of the world’s largest gas, oil or coal corporations producing 80% of the world’s CO2 emissions, increasing their production since 2016 (Watts, 2024). As a result, fossil fuel corporations continue to resist stopping production, as evident in how representatives to the COP28 in December 2023 could only craft a final agreement employing languaging that countries need to “transition away” from than “phase out” fossil fuels (Joselow, 2024).

This languaging of the presumed benefits of growth also serves to benefit the top one percent of the wealthiest people whose use and display of consumption over the past 25 years, for example, flying in private jets, results in their contributing twice the negative carbon imprint of the bottom 50% (Clifford, 2021). This push for growth as equated with increased incomes leading to increased emissions, will paradoxically lead to a decline in global income by about 19% or $38 trillion in the next 25 years, with the poorest areas of the world–those with little production of emissions—having the highest declines in incomes (Borenstein, 2024).

Some people who disagree with this view of growth use a different term, “degrowth,” to question whether continuous growth is really necessary for the survival of a capitalist economy, for people’s happiness, and for the well-being of society as a whole (Hickel, 2021; Saito, 2024).

As a degrowth proponent noted:

[…] capitalism has always valued the need to extract everything it can—all the oil, all the nutrients from the soil, all the rare metals, and so on—from the world. This is known as extractivism, and it has placed an enormous burden on the Earth (Saito, 2024, p. 13).

Degrowth critics also note how languaging the value of continuous growth also reifies a separation of humans from nature to promote the economic benefits for humans as opposed to benefitting ecosystems associated with practices such as “‘rewilding nature’, the ‘reintroduction’ of wolves in western Europe, the monetized ‘foraging industry’” (Evans, 2024, p. 29).

Students could examine how the concept of “growth” is used in news stories, ads or political speeches. For example, they could read about daily changes in gross domestic progress as an important part of a capitalist economy that justifies continued consumption. Critiquing the assumed need for excessive consumption would make them think about how their own or their family’s consumption involves more fossil fuel use.

Students could also critique languaging about the benefits of “growth” in their communities, for example, how real estate companies use the concept of “desirable neighborhoods” to promote sales of large homes in suburbs or near oceans, even though those homes may be impacted by sea rise. They may then note how residents of these often large, single-family homes in suburbs are highly dependent on cars because of the lack of mass transit, which generates higher emissions levels than those in cities with denser housing, public transit, nearby stores, resources and schools (Popovich et al., 2022). In doing so, students recognize the need to support the social needs of others residing in their local communities (Nyarko et al., 2023), for example, the need for more mass transit or the lack of local grocery stores in “food desert” low-income neighborhoods.

Students could also study examples of languaging designed to frame communities in terms of alternative perspectives related to urban community design. For example, they could use the language of “walkable cities” or the “15-minute city” as descriptors promoting urban density and ready access to stores/office buildings in ways that reduce emissions because of dependency on cars and trucks.

Responding to languaging in literary texts to create literary texts

Given that “most people have not yet heard a story about climate change that sounds like it was written for them, in language that connects with their interests, values, or identity” (Corbett, 2021, p. 105), youth may benefit from responding to languaging in climate fiction (cli-fi) (Milkoreit, 2016; Rosenthal, 2024; Young, 2022). Teachers can have students adopt “ecolinguistic” perspectives, highlighting the importance of “stories we live by” as portraying and enacting ways of connecting with ecosystems and peoples (Stibbe, 2015). In doing so, they may respond to portrayals of “bodies and landscapes as the storied embodiments of countless intra-acting agencies–pollutants, political choices, non/human creativities, and natural dynamics” (Iovino, 2018, p.115).

Students could also respond to characters engaging in dialogue for languaging their beliefs and attitudes about climate change in narratives leading to change (Young, 2022). In one study, readers were most likely to increase their beliefs that climate change is human-caused based on responding to characters engaging in languaging as rebuttals to arguments that climate change is not human-caused (Schneider-Mayerson et al., 2020). In another study, students in a high school in Queens, New York, a community that experienced damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012, read the graphic novel Global: One Fragile World: An Epic Fight for Survival (Colfer and Donkin, 2023) portraying similar climate change impacts, leading to students sharing their experiences similar to those of the characters’ experiences in the novel (Coulson, 2024).

Students can also critique characters’ languaging in narratives celebrating the ecological destruction caused by colonialist expansions and “conquering” of the American West and Native American populations, as well as the destruction of buffalos who preserve ecosystems (Burns, 2023).

Students could also respond to novels portraying the adverse impacts of fossil fuel corporations (Tanaka, 2022). For example, they could read the collection The Weight of Light (Eschrich and Miller, 2018, free download at https://csi.asu.edu/books/weight/), which contains stories of characters coping with the challenges of transitioning from a dependency on fossil fuel to using solar renewable energy.

Given the previous discussion of languaging of “growth” versus “degrowth,” students could also respond to characters in literature employing “degrowth” languaging for critiquing fossil fuel corporations. They might react to the young adult book Want (Pon, 2017), whose main character, Zhou, is experiencing the death of his mother because of the Jin Corp.’s high levels of smog and pollution in his city. This corporation produces pollution and sells special suits for the rich to use to protect themselves from pollution, leading only to the poor population suffering in the city. Zhou and his peers decide to infiltrate the corporation based on voicing a languaging of degrowth to justify their actions to close down the corporation. They ultimately succeed, resulting in a reduction of pollution as well as increased support for the finances and health of poor residents.

Students could also respond to the novel, New York 2140 (Robinson, 2017), in which much of Manhattan is under water because of sea rise and a hurricane, so wealthy people now live on the upper floors of high-rise buildings. Corporations and Wall Street created a system to make money by betting on sea rise impacts and owning and selling properties that are not underwater based on a set of financial laws protecting corporations and Wall Street to make betting on sea level rise a lucrative business.

Two of the main characters, Mutt and Jeff, determine a way to change these financial laws based on degrowth languaging recalling a time in the past when “‘there was a country across the sea, where everyone tried their best to make a community that worked for everyone […] Everyone was equal there’” (Robinson, p. 296). They and other citizens stage a strike, leading to transforming the current system into a more equitable one benefitting the general population based on environmental protection, a 90% corporate tax rate and full employment programs.

In one assignment, students compared scientific writing with nature poetry on the same topic about nature to contrast the ideas, purposes, audiences and language based on the use of literary languaging (Micalay-Hurtado and Poole, 2022). This resulted in students perceiving how poetry connects them directly with nature rather than scientific writing.

Students can also respond to and employ metaphors for languaging relations with ecosystems in literature or nonfiction. One study of people’s responses to the use of metaphors of war versus race found that participants responded with higher emotional levels to metaphors of war associated with destruction than metaphors of race (Flusberg, et al., 2017).

As part of the Turn It Around Project (https://turnitaroundcards.org) students reflected on the uses of status-quo “root” metaphors shaping and reifying perceptions of climate change, leading to their creating art work representations of the meaning of these metaphors (Anayatova et al., 2022). These metaphors included the use of earth as a “machine” “that assumes that the world works like a machine […] rather than a living organism” (p. 43), leading a student to create the image of people putting nature through a meat grinder for profit. Another metaphor was that of an “arrow of time” that assumed that events in the past predict certain inevitable, set futures, as opposed to the idea of engaging in deliberate actions to make changes. Students then created images of broken arrows of time to portray how human actions or inactions lead to different futures.

Students can also employ personifications as metaphors to describe their relations with ecosystems. For example, they might select a tree or trees in their neighborhood and create personifications of that tree or trees as functioning as persons who absorb emissions (Tidd, 2023).

Languaging for talking and writing about enacting relations with ecosystems

By visiting ecosystems such as local parks or forests to engage in languaging about their interactions with ecosystems, students recognize that their current and future well-being depends on the survival of those ecosystems, leading to valuing their relations with these ecosystems that support humans and how they need to support those ecosystems (Dare and Fletcher, 2021; Helne and Hirvilammi, 2015). In doing so, they recognize that their “interrelatedness that makes our organs fail in extreme heat, leaves local economies reeling from cyclones, and leads to complex intergenerational grief when the rising tides slowly eat away ancestral homelands” (Verlie, 2022, p. 7).

In her college writing class, Kim Freeman (2024) has students read a chapter from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom. Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Kimmerer, 2013), in which Kimmerer distinguishes between English involving the use of nouns versus Native American Potawatomi language as using verbs that “reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world” (p. 56).

Students, especially bilingual students and English Language Learners (ELLs), often face unfair environmental justice issues related to racism, poverty and economic inequality in their communities. They may also use translanguaging to see how Indigenous languages and other languages are changing, moving around and blending in different global settings (Garcia and Wei, 2013).

Students may also transfer their responses to languaging in literary texts to perceive the world as itself a text enacted by and through narrative shaped by cultural perspectives (Hinkel et al., 2020; Iovino, 2018). They can then share their narratives about their perceptions and experiences with the climate crisis to connect with audiences (Eide and Kunelius, 2021; Share, 2024; Walsh et al., 2021), for example, sharing experiences in nature for languaging the need to protect ecosystems (Harvey et al., 2023). “The task before us is telling new stories that replace the harmful mythic ones that trap us in social inertia. We need new stories to envision a positive future, shape meaning and create possibilities for new types of action” (Corbett, 2021, p. 271). As part of the larger Project Drawdown, members of the Drawdown Stories Project (https://drawdown.org/programs/drawdown-stories) represent diverse voices and share narratives of their experiences coping with differences in environmental justice issues across different ecosystems and communities.

In one study, students shared narratives about the adverse impacts of high temperatures in their communities, leading to their peers bonding through sharing similar adverse heat impacts (Conrad, 2022). They have also shared common experiences about their emotions based on going on a nature walk using digital writing (https://tinyurl.com/dybxnc8v) (Richmond and Gambino, 2024a). One student who grew up in Mexico wrote an essay, “The Evolution of the Apple” (Ortega, 2024), to explore languaging the meaning of “apple”:

In my mother’s ranch, which is relatively remote, an apple is cherished since it is seen as nature giving back for taking care of its tree. However, in the USA, the word “apple” is associated with a tech company, which is responsible for contributing a large carbon footprint. This company takes away meaning from the true beauty that is a gift from nature, the apple. (p. 141)

In another project, students created maps using languaging to identify different resources in their local community to reflect on and create narratives of their connections with their local dwellings (Jeong and Silverman, 2023). They then wrote poems describing what they perceived to be the negative changes in their communities because of gentrification, highway construction, lack of trees and loss of ready connections to local shops and parks, leading to their need to take action to challenge these changes by adopting “a sense of entanglement and an alternative sense of belonging to the Earth to help students understand that we are all connected” (p. 18).

After studying infographics about climate change impacts, students in a ninth-grade ELA class wrote stories or poems (Falkner, 2022). One student wrote a story about the languaging that occurred in a family when a son of coal miners took a job installing solar panels.

Analysis of a college student’s autobiographical writing based on her visits to an urban forest led the student to create her own “where I’m from” poem that included the following lines:

“I am From” Poem

I am from vineyards and pine needles

From still lakes and full moons

sunburned cheeks and cherry earrings

cracked earthand cracked feet (Hill and Piersol, 2019, p. 61).

A program at the University of Minnesota trained community members from different regions in Minnesota to interact with local residents as “climate conversations” focusing particularly on the use of place-based narratives about local issues leading to engaging in actions to address climate change in their communities (Clark et al., 2023). Their interactions with community members led to the creation of a book club about climate action, their city becoming a GreenStep City member and members establishing regulated monthly meetings with their local Sierra Club members. In their program evaluation, participants reported increased self-efficacy and confidence in communicating with others, as well as shifting from information delivery to engaging in conversations for building relations.

In one study, students engaged in creating essays and stories related to corporate control of local water rights based on how corporations were extracting water from springs, endangering aquifers and polluting water, all of which limited access to fresh water in ways that enhanced their sense of agency as assuming roles for identifying problems related to the need for change (Panos and Sherry, 2023).

In another study, in activities coordinated by ELA teachers, students collaboratively formulated a policy statement to send to school administrators and school board members regarding the need to switch their school district’s gas school buses to electric school buses to reduce emissions from the gas school buses (Beach, 2023a). In crafting their statement, students focused on languaging to achieve positive uptake from administrators and board members. These students also engaged in languaging for collectively planning with peers to work on school gardens in their schools to study alternative planting practices related to regenerative agriculture methods. Analysis of faculty and student languaging about promoting and working on school gardens on two university campuses served to enhance their sense of care for ecosystems leading to adopting “ecocentric identities” (Milstein et al., 2023, p. 2) through engaging in:

Embodied, personal and political positive environmental communication [that] happens within, and emerges from, direct experiential engagement with such food growing, tending, and sharing–which can lead to active questioning and reimagining of dominant modes of food production, consumption, cost, waste, access, and justice. (p. 13)

One benefit of students engaging in these projects involving talking and writing is that receiving positive feedback for their ideas bolsters their self-confidence in formulating their ideas with others (Fecho and Clifton, 2017).

Critiquing and employing languaging in media

Teachers may also have students critique the use of languaging in media employed to deceive or misrepresent climate change issues in the media. Consistent with the languaging of the value of capitalist economic growth (Hickel, 2021; Saito, 2024), media audiences are socialized to value growth through languaging in commercial media advertisements, celebrating the positive rewards of purchasing and using products as status symbols. For example, advertisements portray passengers enjoying their plane flights literally and figuratively above and separate from nature as an enjoyable experience (Damico and Baildon, 2022).

Students may critique how fossil fuel corporations use languaging by using:

• individuals’ “carbon footprint” to shift the focus on the need for individuals to assume the primary responsibility for addressing climate change as opposed to the corporations addressing climate change.

• the word “natural” in their media commercials for natural gas stoves and furnaces, failing to disclose the fact that natural gas releases emissions including nitrogen dioxide, formaldehyde and benzene, emissions are associated with health problems such as asthma, heart disease and cancer (Hayhoe, 2022).

• the word “uncertainty” to challenge to climate change science documenting the adverse climate change impacts requiring government action (Oreskes and Conway, 2023) as well as the use of the word “alarmist” to criticize these claims (Guenther, 2024).

• “greenwashing” that fails to disclose adverse climate change impacts to promote their products as environmentally sustainable (Richmond and Gambino, 2024b; https://tinyurl.com/3ps6xh44). For example, a Fiji Natural Water advertisement posits that “Fiji is as a gift from nature to us, to repay our gift of leaving it completely alone. Bottled at the source, untouched, unmanned. It’s earth’s finest water” (Our Changing Climate, 2017; http://t.ly/TC4AK). One problem with this claim is that plastic bottles take an average of 450 years to break down, while at the same time, 47% of the natives of Fiji do not have access to clean drinking water.

Students can also employ media to communicate the need for larger audiences to address the climate crisis (Beach and Smith, 2023). For example, a 17-year-old student, Sagar Aryal, in Nepal, worked with community members and his school peers to create a website (https://www.sanosansar.org) containing resources for addressing climate change (Field, 2017). Students in a composition classroom for ELL students employed languaging on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter social media platforms and a podcast proposing actions to address environmental justice issues (Micalay-Hurtado and Poole, 2022).

Students may also study and employ media to organize protests and strikes at both the local and global levels, as when the citizens of Houston put up billboards after a hurricane stating, “We Know Who Is To Blame” beside the names of oil companies (Watts, 2024, np). Youth activists involved in climate protests and strikes from 23 countries perceived the need for more global action rather than local action used media to lobby global organizations and encourage countries to take action (Eide and Kunelius, 2021). University students organized the Fossil Free Research campaign (https://www.fossilfreeresearch.org) to pressure universities to stop research based on funding from fossil fuel corporations. One student noted “it’s a way to build our base and get more people plugged in…Anything we can do to get this idea out into a popular discourse goes a long way.” (Fisher, 2024, p. 106).

Engaging in role-play activities

Students could also employ languaging for engaging in role-plays to adopt alternative language and assume roles and perspectives on climate change topics, such as participating in mock trials assessing the guilt or innocence of fossil fuel executives (Bigelow, 2014). Students engaged in the World Climate role-play (https://www.climateinteractive.org/world-climate-simulation), leading to employing novel languaging thinking about climate change policies (Sterman et al., 2015).

Students can also engage in drama activities in online contexts, for example, assuming roles in online discussion boards and sharing related images, videos or links in their interactions (Hassall, 2018). In assuming these roles, students assess their uptake from their languaging roles by reflecting on and assessing what they have learned from their interactions, for example, how specific languaging results in more effective uptake than other languaging (Fecho and Clifton, 2017).

Students can also engage in role-plays about addressing climate change policy issues, for example, using the World Climate role-play platform (Sterman et al., 2015). Engaging in these role-plays prepares students to engage in lobbying or connecting with school administrators, school board members and local, state and national government officials/elected politicians to change policies and laws related to climate change (Bigelow, 2014; Hassall, 2018). Students engaged in Playing With Uncertainty role-play game related to community planning for and making budget decisions for resilience for coping with flooding from sea rise in New Zealand (Avendano‐Uribe et al., 2022).

Students participated in Massive Open Online Courses focused on climate justice, with specific aims to “empower [learners] to engage critically in climate change and climate justice debates and to be critical observers of the climate conference in Paris (2015)” (Otto et al., 2019, p. 13). Through their course participation, students experienced some of the highest observed gains in their ability to explain connections between climate change and social justice.

Conclusion and implications for instruction

Given that the clock is ticking, the planet’s future depends on current generations enacting change to reduce emissions relatively quickly. There is a need for ELA teachers to go beyond just teaching knowledge and examples of climate change effects related to having students employ languaging for creating social relations for transforming status-quo systems to reduce those emissions. Teachers can engage students in languaging for:

• Examining how language functions to enact relations with the ecosystems and others to enact and transform communities. In doing so, students critique the use of languaging constituting status quo energy and community/transportation systems by examining the use of economic growth given the need to limit growth to reduce practices requiring energy-producing emissions.

• Responding to literature focusing on examples of characters using languaging to engage in interactions with other characters about actions for addressing climate change.

• discussing or writing essays, stories or poems for languaging about climate change with their teachers and peers.

• critiquing and using media related to how media portrays and promotes certain consumption practices related to adverse climate change impacts.

• engaging in role-play activities for adopting languaging to achieve uptake from audiences regarding the need to take action to address climate change.

Given the centrality of languaging for enacting relations with others (Beach and Beauchemin, 2017; Beach and Bloome, 2019), one implication for instruction is that students need to have classroom time to interact with each other in face-to-face or online discussions to share their perceptions about climate change so that they then perceive the value of participating in collective action mediated through languaging (Bloome and Beauchemin, 2016)

Students are also more likely to perceive the value of using languaging when they assume roles based on being responsible for taking action with and for others. As members of environmental clubs in two high schools, students initiated their projects requiring that they employ languaging to define the purpose and value of these projects to other club members (Beach, 2023a). When they achieved results in these projects leading to changes, they recognized the value of the languaging they employed to achieve uptake.

Teachers could then provide feedback or assess students’ use of languaging by determining their ability to critique languaging for promoting practices detrimental to the environment and employ languaging to achieve uptake from others, leading to collective action. Teachers may then note how when students become more accustomed to employing languaging with and for others over time, they gain a sense of agency for achieving uptake from peers and community members related to enhancing their ability to use languaging for enacting systemic change (Toivonen, 2022).