“We don’t know how to do college with all this going on”: Managing eco-anxiety in today’s geography classroom
Topics: Education
, Environment
, Feminist Geographies
Keywords: anxiety, care, education, emotion, pedagogy
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 45
Authors:
Kayla Yurco, James Madison University
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Abstract
Anxiety, stress, and hopelessness about environmental crises are rapidly growing phenomena. Increasingly discussed as “eco-anxiety,” such reactions to awareness of global environmental crises and effects of climate change are being felt differently by today’s youth than ever before. Greater access to information means that most of our students—not just those studying the environment—learn at an early age of bleak forecasts for global warming, tragic intersections between climate change and social justice, and wicked problems impeding global and local sustainability pursuits. Students of geography are specifically well positioned to grasp the complexity of our world’s challenges; their heightened exposure and inquiry into those challenges means they are also very likely to experience emotional growing pains along the way. This paper engages with these realities and considers challenges and opportunities for acknowledging and working with eco-anxieties in the modern geography classroom. It considers how faculty and staff might encourage awareness of and engagement with our world’s crises without leading students to overwhelm, and it discusses strategies that might be used to validate student (and instructor!) experiences of eco-anxiety while still motivating deliberation and possibility. Finally, it asks how geographic thinking might be key for students to envision and advocate for more hopeful, equitable, and sustainable futures—and how geographic thinking might be key to strategies of care for those of us teaching in an eco-anxious world.
“We don’t know how to do college with all this going on”: Managing eco-anxiety in today’s geography classroom
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
Description
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