Coming of Age in a Time of Perils
Continuing a series of posts about how educators can support students in pursuing lives of value, this week I describe my view on the crises young people today face, their resistance so far, and the initial responses of the educational system; next week I think about how teachers should respond in our work with students. These two posts will draw from a research paper I wrote this past fall called Reshaping Teacher-Student Relationships Amidst Crises of the Anthropocene.
In August 2018, teenager Greta Thunberg began skipping school to sit in front of the Swedish parliament, protesting their inaction in the face of global climate crisis. Inspired by the Parkland March for our Lives youth protests in the United States in response to gun violence in schools, Thunberg took to Instagram and Twitter; soon #FridaysForFuture became an international demonstration of resistance. Eventually teenagers in 7,500 cities on all continents engaged in one of the few rebellious acts available to them: striking from school (Fridays for Future, 2022). Soon, fourteen million students were missing from classrooms around the world. Some teachers were wholeheartedly supportive, others frustrated and critical, and others still a dizzying combination of impressed, dismayed, and uncertain (Chu, 2019; O’Neill, 2019).
Student reactions to varied ecological, political, and economic crises of the Anthropocene increasingly affect and even implicate teachers and educators. Teachers are among the adults that Thunberg and the movement around her censure for existential irresponsibility. For students, school is a manifestation of authority, status quo, and dissonant worldviews, and teachers are often the adults most present with students as they grapple with making meaning of the world around them.
The impending local and global crises of the Anthropocene — and students’ increasing appreciation for the crises already underway — will undermine relationships between educators and their students by eroding the confidence students have in older generations as trustworthy creators and stewards of their futures. Middlebury and Swarthmore professors Jonathan Isham and Lee Smithey warn that “we risk losing credibility with young people if we cannot take action in support of the defining cause of their generation” (2019). Now as never before their “we” applies not just to university professors but also to educators of much younger students. It is reasonable, after all, for students to doubt whether they have anything of fundamental value to learn from generations that have been truant in their societal obligations and myopic in their understanding of progress.
A Time of Perils
The idea of “the Anthropocene” was first popularized by scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer to recognize the “major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales” (2000, p. 1). As the term gained popularity across disciplines a wealth of literature sought to track the phenomenon’s roots, define its characteristics, assess its implications, and criticize its limitations. This complicating etymological proliferation represents the diversity of crises and meta-crises facing humanity and the world today. The “time of perils’’ hypothesis posits that humanity today is facing myriad unprecedented threats (MacAskill, 2022). Climate change, natural and engineered pandemics, nuclear weapons, and artificial intelligence all pose serious threats to the future of humanity, and economic and political turmoil and unrest exacerbate the possibilities for and consequences of catastrophe (Ord, 2020). The Anthropocene is therefore best understood as an evolving, multifaceted, and incomplete phenomenon relevant in disciplines well beyond its origin in geology.
Students increasingly experience the temporally and spatially complex, inscrutable phenomena like climate change through other massive, tangled entities like smartphones and the internet in ways never-before experienced by youth. What emerges is an overwhelming degree of complexity that students are left to navigate as they are bombarded with narratives of negativity, which are known to permeate particularly well through these networks (Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century, 2021).
Psycho-emotional responses of youth include hopelessness and anger which, as Donna Haraway puts it, “makes a great deal of sense in the midst of the earth’s sixth great extinction event and in the midst of engulfing wars, extractions, and immiserations of billions of people and other critters” (2016b, p. 4). Young people are consistently found to be more concerned than older generations with global climate crises, and this worry is linked with prolonged psychological distress over time (McBride et al., 2021; Poortinga et al., 2019). Hickman et al. found in a global study of 10,000 young people aged 16–25 that 75% agreed that “the future is frightening” and and 55% agreed that “humanity is doomed” (2021). While some amount of worry and anxiety can be associated with motivation, belief in efficacy, and action (Ojala et al., 2021), student climate activists Naina Agrawal-Hardin and Maya Green describe how a lack of agency or sense of control can exacerbate anxiety when students feel they have no opportunities to imagine solutions to the problems they fear (2022).
The state of young generations appears grim: students experience a complex, dark, and unjust world through similarly complex, addictive technological mediums, all while losing faith in the adults and institutions that might once have grounded and supported them. Students have not been passive in their resistance, however, and their words and actions suggest pathways for remediation of unrealized potential for comfort and empowerment from their relationships with teachers.
Student Action
Student activism and intergenerational conflict are nothing new. In Student Resistance: A History of the Unruly Subject, Mark Edelman Boren argues that students’ idealistic struggles against constraining sources of authority have long driven social evolution and have significantly changed the world they ultimately inherited (2019). The very Boomers subject to Millennial and Gen-Z derision led the free speech, anti-war, and civil rights protests of the 60s and 70s, some mobilized by the doctrine of “Don’t trust anyone over 30” (Moore, 2016).
The recent waves of student activism are not simply the latest iteration of a long history of youth-led protest, however, but rather a response to unprecedented civilizational instability and a demand for a phase-shift in traditional educational configurations (Boren, 2021). The age of students involved is a key difference too: The literature on student protests almost universally uses ‘student’ to mean university student, for college campuses have historically been the epicenters of youth activism. In the last decade, however, even elementary students have developed the sense of agency and identification as activists that prior generations only discovered in college (Boren, 2021).
Political and economic leaders have borne the brunt of student outrage and activism, but all adults are implicated by Thunberg’s movement: “Adults keep saying, “We owe it to young people to give them hope.” I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic….I want you to act as if the house is on fire. Because it is” (“Greta Thunberg,” 2019). Other youth climate leaders speak directly to the dissonance they experience between their view of the world and the inaction they see in adults: Ugandan activist Leah Namugerwa said, “I noticed adults were not willing to offer leadership and I chose to volunteer myself. Environmental injustice is injustice to me.” American teen activist Jerome Foster II said, “Adults take note of this message: Young people like myself should not have to take on this burden, this is supposed to be your job but now we have to go on hunger strikes, meet with government officials, and start a global movement for you to even notice” (EARTHDAY.ORG, 2019).
This activism and intergenerational conflict directly affected education during the 2019 school strikes, as students “literally walked out of a form of schooling (and politics) that does not address their present and future concerns’’ (Mayes & Holdsworth, 2020, p. 100). The “classroom takeovers” during the international, student-led “Teach the Teacher” campaign in 2021 explicitly sought to invert the traditional authority of teachers so that students could explain “what it is like to be a young person experiencing a climate emergency” (Teach The Teacher, 2022, n.p.).
In Facing the Anthropocene: Comparative Education as Sympoiesis, Iveta Silova offers a reminder that in addition to high-profile cases students around the world have been involved in activism “in contexts where the effects of climate crisis are felt in most immediate ways and where young people have been responding to the devastating impacts of climate crisis for decades without much media attention” (p. 588). Indigenous environmental movements too have intersected with and supported youth climate protest, and student activists draw upon indigenous ways of knowing to imagine possibilities for positive societal change (Silova, 2021).
Anderson and Keehn describe a generation “growing increasingly tired of expressing their concerns to what they interpret as a generation of ambivalent older Americans” (2020, p. 57). Students increasingly feel — and are perhaps more than ever justified in feeling — that adults in their life do not understand nor respect them, and have little of value to teach them.
Educational Response
To teach in this context is a daunting yet existentially important task and therefore deserves equally dramatic shifts in personal and systemic educational practice to meet the drama of the time. While student unease and rebellion in the context of global upheaval is not a uniquely modern phenomenon, the physical and emotional activation of students as young as elementary school is a novel challenge for educators. As organizations and systems slowly mobilize to explore means of addressing the needs of existentially distressed students, individual teachers can examine and adapt their own practices with more urgency to support students in the face of these crises, focusing on the foundation of education: teacher-student relationships.
Educational theorists have begun to discuss the implications of the crises of the Anthropocene on classrooms and content. A plethora of recent articles situate school subjects within modern Anthropocene theorizing including math (Watson & Smith, 2022), science (Wallace et al., 2022), history (McGregor et al., 2021), and art (Jagodzinski, 2020). Annette Gough in Education in the Anthropocene advocates for education that “provides opportunities for learning to live in and engage with the world and which acknowledges that we live in a more-than-human world” (2020, n.p.). Her work builds on Teresa Lloro-Bidart’s recommendations for education in the Anthropocene, which include “interdisciplinarity” and “alternative modes of thought” like mobile lives, post-carbon social theory, and Indigenous or ecofeminist/posthumanist perspectives (2015, pp. 132–133).
Updates to content and theory are warranted and necessary for remaking education in the Anthropocene, but communicating directly with teachers about their day-to-day work is similarly pressing. In a recent mass email campaign to educators, Presidio Graduate School urged action: “The pleas from students are clear: they want climate change to be taught in schools to help address the anxiety their generation already feels about the issue and how it will affect their future….If you are a teacher, what are you waiting for?” (2022).
Teachers must engage in practices that afford them the ability to reimagine, and then enact, a form of teacher-student relationship that befits the unique troubles of our time. In doing so, teachers and students may co-create a shared sense of reality and together begin to update humanity’s mode of being in the world.
My proposition here is for focus on a suite of more personal, relational reforms that are immediately actionable for educators. In Learning to Live in the Anthropocene: Our Children and Ourselves Susan Laird moves the conversation around Anthropocene education in the direction of the interpersonal, proposing “moral aims” for educators that include “fostering children’s growth in ways that sustain both environmental and human health” (2017, p.275) and Maria Ojala has published extensively on the psychological and emotional responses of youth to climate change, including a recent call for critical emotional awareness training for teachers to better support their students (2022). This emerging subdomain of Anthropocene education literature recognizes that maintaining and creating healthy relationships with students will preserve the fertile soil in which longer-term curricular updates may bloom.
Relationships under threat
When students, families, and teachers were stripped of the social and relational components of education during the pandemic, they experienced first-hand what researchers and professionals in the field have known: relationships between students and their teachers are essential for well-being and positive academic outcomes. Because optimal learning requires sustained personal relationships and emotional connection, the role of the teacher is threatened when adults are seen as unreflective and complicit in allowing, if not creating, apocalyptic crises (Stein, 2019).
Jeffrey Cornelius-White’s meta-analysis of 119 studies of person-centered education — which “posits that positive teacher-student relationships are associated with optimal, holistic learning” — finds average positive correlations with cognitive and behavioral outcomes that exceed other, non-relationship-based innovations in education (2007, p. 113). A meta-analysis by Roorda et al. found that positive relationships are associated with both engagement and achievement (2011). These findings are consistent with the theoretical basis of Ryan and Deci’s popular self-determination theory, which argues that relatedness — or social connection — is one of three key factors in the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being (2000).
The crises of the Anthropocene will put pressure on the key relational component of successful education. Already the voices of student activists and the messages implicit in more diffuse intergenerational communication suggest strains on aspects of teacher-student relationships. Students increasingly do not trust that adults in positions of power have their best interests in mind, they are skeptical of the seat of authority from which adults can share knowledge and wisdom, and they believe that adults do not respect their worldviews or believe that adults are protecting their right to a promising future.
I therefore arrive at a trio of specific relational constructs that are essential components of a healthy educational ecosystem and are at unique risk during this time of rapid change, disruption, and uncertainty:
- Trust: Students’ belief that their teachers have their best interests in mind.
- Epistemic authority: Students’ beliefs that their teachers possess useful and valuable knowledge, experience, and wisdom.
- Respect: Students’ belief that teachers value and care about their identities and futures, and that their teachers possess characteristics or traits that they want to emulate.
Understanding the role that each of these constructs plays in a healthy educational system provides the groundwork for making recommendations for restoration and improvement, which teachers can begin as soon as today. Next week I will share research about these constructs and provide my thoughts on how teachers can and must address them.
Full citations for the papers referenced above can be found here.
