Meet Our Contributor:
| Stephanie Branson is a fierce advocate for young adult literature and authentic writing pedagogy, with a focus on fostering student engagement through diverse text selections. She has been a literacy leader as a high school English teacher, district-level learning facilitator, and curriculum writer in one of Texas’s largest public school districts for the past 13 years. Stephanie earned her undergraduate degree from Louisiana State University in the Geaux Teach English cohort and her graduate degree from the University of North Texas in Literacy Curriculum and Instruction. She has presented at both the National Council for Teachers of English and the Texas Council of Teachers of English Language Arts. She can be reached at [email protected]. Please connect! |  |
Texts to Build Foundational Climate and Environmental Awareness with High School Students
The environment and climate are not just scientific areas to be studied but are significant forces influencing Earth that have clear social, cultural, and ethical implications. Introducing students to conversations about the environment requires careful and intentional framing that moves beyond larger concrete concepts and grounds discussions in the lived experiences of others. Teenagers are hard to please! Why should they care about something so beyond their current reality? Therein lies our charge as ethical educators in the public-school classroom.
Building foundational climate and environmental awareness within students can be a difficult topic to navigate in a way that maintains the classroom community when considering the real complexity of the related issues. The classroom provides an essential, safe space for this work, allowing young people to encounter ideas about human environmental relationships, ethical responsibilities of different groups, and sustainability through the lens of literature.
Young adult literature and nonfiction in particular offer a common and accessible ground for this initial exploration, merging a prior comfortability and ease with narrative and story with newer topics for critical inquiry. By guiding students to analyze characters’ relationships with place, a community’s impact on the environment, and consequences of actions, English and literacy teachers can cultivate both cultural and environmental empathy with critical literacy skills. Discussions around climate and the environment are multifaceted and challenging, especially when discussing the communities who live and confront this reality firsthand. An approach using young adult literature not only deepens reading and writing comprehension and analysis but also empowers students to consider their roles as humans and citizens within the larger context of our world.
My current junior-level English 3 students do not interact with these bigger ideas of climate, environmental impacts, and the ethics surrounding environmental issues on most days. They are busy living their teenage lives: going to school, practicing their musical pursuits, clobbering each other at athletics practice. Aside from a handful of scientifically-motivated students and to-the-core change makers, these students have a variety of other worries that are in their face impacting them daily; climate and the environment are two forces that feel “far” from them as these are not in their sphere of relevancy. This is where young adult literature comes in and has the ability to make significant impacts. If we can flood our classroom libraries with books that tactfully build foundational awareness surrounding climate and the environment, students will have the opportunity to open their minds and frame these concepts in the broader context of their lives.
Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman is one of the most engaging, yet profound works of environmental criticism for young and teen readers. This novel, a fast-paced survival thriller, allows students to dig into the nuanced topics of ethical resource stewardship, resource declination, human morality, mob mentality, and social order disruption when extreme weather events occur. Paced around a water scarcity crisis in California, the two dual protagonists, Kelton and Alyssa, are faced with obstacles they must overcome to ensure their survival. Students will be able to make connections with our current society and the real-world consequences of environmental decisions, understanding how environmental stressors can affect communities, political and social systems, and individual decision-making.
Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi is another survival novel, this time taking place in a future that feels entirely dystopic. Rising sea levels and devastating hurricanes and weather events have transformed the now-Gulf Coast into a memory of its former self. Coastal cities, such as New Orleans, have been completely submerged and citizens have convened into tribes and factions based on their physical strengths and qualities. The protagonist, Nailer, works for a salvage crew of beached ships when a large hurricane brings in a luxurious ship with a sole survivor. The protagonist must decide whether to leverage the survivor for his gain or deliver her to safety. This text allows students to understand the outcomes of environmental collapse, systemic inequality, and the difficult moral choices that come up when survival is the only goal. Students can examine how power, gender and financial privilege, and resource scarcity come together, as well as reflect on how negative environmental changes disproportionately impact vulnerable communities.
Fault Lines by Nora Shalaway Carpenter takes a completely different approach to building climate and environmental awareness through forging intertwined relationships in this mostly-realistic fiction novel. This novel is set in the beautiful and magnetic current-day Appalachian West Virginia and follows two teens working through personal crises of their own. This novel centers around the criticism of and simultaneously need for fracking in America’s rural communities. Carpenter takes a thoughtful and nuanced approach to describing the lived experiences and true struggles of the communities in rural America – an approach that is both balanced and critical of the use of these lands for oil development. Whereas some works may simply criticize fracking and oil development with scathing commentary, Carpenter brings a fresh perspective with complexity and addresses these concerns with sensitivity. On one hand, fracking can destroy these lands held dear, but this industry also provides numerous jobs and opportunities to communities where employment is already scarce. Like I said, this book is nuanced and full of gray space. There is no clear right or wrong and students can discover the complexity of these issues with their own conclusions through the insights provided in this fictional community and relationship between the protagonists.
I hope these three novels can inspire a new focus to bookshelves, book clubs, or even a whole-class novel study and can engage conversations with students about the future of our world. If we all do our best to make our tiny piece of society better, I know we will be left with something more beautiful than we even have now. I want to leave this with my favorite quote from Dry: “Putting me at the forefront of his thoughts drew out what little energy he had left, just as when I had focused on helping him--and I realize that this is the true core of human nature: When we’ve lost the strength to save ourselves, we somehow find the strength to save each other
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