Lyndsay Moffatt  PhD

While it is impossible to anticipate all of the needs of the next generation, current research concerning climate change and the disappearance of readily available fossil fuels suggests that literacies for environmental sustainability, ecological literacies, or environmental literacies, may be some of the most essential gifts we can give children and young people who are currently attending school, or who are destined to enter the school system in the next decade. 

 

To date, few, if any reviews have been conducted to examine how issues of climate change and environmental sustainability are being taken up, or talked about, by literacy education researchers, or if these issues have been embraced at all.

 

This project has begun with a literature review of how literacy education researchers have responded to issues of climate change and environmental sustainability. 

 

Using sociological ideas of cultural production and applied discourse analysis, analysis of the existing research suggests that for the most part, literacy education researchers have not responded to pressing issues of climate change and environmental sustainability. In addition, it suggests that literacy researchers’ current lack of engagement with one of the most pressing issues of our time may be intimately related to enduring ideologies of literacy education that see literacy as autonomous from social context.

 

The first paper from this project was published in the journal Literacy and Social Responsibility.