Eve Mayes

Preparing young people to meet the complex challenges of a rapidly warming world has become an important international educational priority. However, recent work on ‘petro-pedagogies’ demonstrates fossil fuel corporations’ influence on curriculum materials and pedagogical experiences in some educational jurisdictions, contributing to uneven opportunities for young people to learn just energy transitions. This article investigates fossil fuel corporations’ engagement in public schools in Australia, based on interviews with ten differently positioned actors across five Australian states and territories (six public school principals in ‘mining towns’, a fossil fuel corporation representative directly responsible for corporate ‘gift-giving’ to public schools, a high school student climate advocate, a parent, and a climate justice campaigner). Interview accounts of fossil fuel corporations’ philanthropic gift-giving, financial donations, sponsoring and curriculum involvement in schools are analysed through the concepts of the gift economy, petro-pedagogies, and curricular justice. Our critical thematic analysis unthreads examples of targeted recruitment strategies of young people in recipient schools, and the purchase of social license through fossil fuel corporations’ branding in and through these schools. We argue that such petro-pedagogical engagements in schools exploit the school funding vacuum and risk inhibiting opportunities for recipients of these gifts to critically examine the fossil fuel industry and to collectively imagine alternative energy futures. We argue for increased public school funding and greater transparency and regulation of fossil fuel corporations’ ‘gift giving’ to public schools.

This article explores the potentials of intergenerational collaboration as a long-term research strategy for shifting social and political imaginaries around climate change. It brings together academics and youth researchers who began working together on the Climate Change and Me project in 2014, along with colleagues who joined them for a public panel, book launch and exhibition ten years later. Climate Change and Me was the first large-scale study of climate change education applying a child- and youth-framed methodology, and has led to numerous exhibitions, curriculum resources, digital platforms, and publications co-created with children and young people. This article gives voice to young people’s reflections on the impact of their involvement with this project a decade on, drawing on the transcript of a public panel conversation at the Design Hub Gallery in Naarm (Melbourne). It explores how young people’s early experiences as child researchers have intersected with political, social and educational change across time, while opening new conversations with intergenerational colleagues working in related areas of climate justice education, activism and research.

The uneven ways in which climate change is taught (or not) within schools, and the uneven opportunities for students to experience justice‐oriented climate education, are curricular injustices. Recent systematic reviews of Climate Change Education literature note a depoliticising tendency in climate change education, with official curriculum documents rarely engaging with issues of justice. This previous research raises questions about how young people involved in climate advocacy narrate their experiences of learning about climate change and justice in and beyond mainstream schooling. This article, co‐authored with four Research Associates who are also climate justice advocates, explores young people's stories of learning (or not) about climate change and climate justice in school and social movement spaces. These accounts were shared during formal research conversations with 61 people and written in 59 survey responses: all participants identified as involved in youth‐led climate justice networks across Australia. We draw on the concept of curricular justice to analyse the inequitable distribution of opportunities to experience justice‐oriented approaches to teaching climate change for young people in Australian schools. Many of these young people describe turning beyond mainstream schooling to experience critical, collective and creative forms of climate justice education that bring climate change into direct connection with social justice. We argue that listening to young climate justice advocates' accounts of their schooling experiences offers valuable insights about the current conditions for learning and acting on climate change in schools. These insights can productively inform the development of justice‐oriented climate change education.

A marked feature of the political tactics of the transnational School Strike 4 Climate movement (also known as Fridays for Futures and Youth Strike for Climate) has been the use of humour on cardboard signs, digital memes and social media posts. Young people’s cardboard signs, memes and social media posts have frequently mobilised humour as public pedagogy and political intervention – to emotionally stir and to politically engage others. In this article, we argue that the school strikers’ creation and mobilisation of humour demonstrate a critical affective climate justice literacy that educators committed to pursuing climate justice have much to learn from. In analysing examples of humour in contemporary student climate justice activism, this article brings previous analyses of the potential of humour in social movement studies and climate change communication into conversation with calls from environmental education scholars to pay greater attention to the potency of emotion for climate justice education, beyond a rationalistic focus on climate science literacy. We outline four pedagogical propositions for working with humour, accompanied by their own perplexities, in moving towards critical affective climate justice literacies.

This commentary reflects on the tensions inherent in enacting creative, co-produced, and participatory methods with younger co-researchers who are also climate justice advocates. Whilst participatory research with young people involved in climate justice work has the potential to build intergenerational networks of solidarity, such research is contoured with complexity. The authors, two university-based researchers, juxtapose the social justice agenda at the foundation of participatory research, with the climate justice agenda, and consider the resonances and tensions between research and social movements. They advocate for an intersectional climate justice approach to participatory research that positions young people as co-researchers and co-authors, aiming to counter epistemic injustices and amplify the voices of those first and worst affected by climate change. Simultaneously, the felt value-action gap (between the justice sought and the injustices that persist within research) generates questions about the profound differences, even incommensurability, between university-generated research and the pursuit of climate justice in movement spaces. A series of questions are offered to those engaged in participatory research with younger people to prompt collective reflection on research processes and practises. The commentary concludes with a call for university-based researchers to engage critically with the power structures within academia and to prioritise the needs and goals of younger climate justice advocates over institutional demands.

The question of how education research can be ‘useful’ is an enduring and challenging one. In recent years, this question has been approached by universities through a widespread ‘impact’ agenda. In this article, we explore the tensions between usefulness and impact and present six stories that reflect on research use with communities. These stories engage issues of the risk of usefulness, the time that is needed to work collaboratively for research usefulness, whether theories developed in universities can be useful to communities for understanding the problems they face, who has the power to steer research to serve their purposes, and how community collective action can enhance the usefulness of research. The article concludes with a section that reflects on the importance of continuing to engage with the debates about research use in often highly commercially oriented university environments. This article brings together diverse voices that wrestle with the politics of research use beyond the neat, linear narratives of change that impact agendas tend to portray. These illustrations of the ethical dilemmas encountered through navigating research use with communities contribute to an ongoing conversation about refusing capitalist and colonialist logics of research extraction while working within institutions often driven by such logics.