Our insights

Suitcase Stories sought to work with diverse young people whose voices are seldom heard in public discourse on climate change.

Together we examined two key questions:

1. Who are already being most affected by climate change?
2. How are they adapting and what can we learn from their experiences?

Through the project the young people met with activists, researchers and community members from both the Global North and South, and from this material they created 'suitcase stories' – micro performances that packed into a suitcase and used objects, voice and narrative to tell stories from the climate frontlines.

Suitcase Stories sought to contribute to enriching the secondary curriculum on climate change by modelling an arts- and narrative-led approach to teaching climate adaptation and community resilience.

The secondary curriculum's coverage of climate change is currently under scrutiny for its narrow subject base, limited experiential learning, and the lack of emotional literacy around the complex and sensitive issues raised by climate crisis. Many schools are seeking new approaches which combat students' ecological anxiety as well as calling on a wide variety of subject skills beyond natural sciences and geography. Their efforts are hampered by the fact that 75% of UK teachers feel they haven't received adequate training to educate students about climate change (Oxfam/UKSCN 2019).

Our emerging insights relate to how climate education is best served by:

1. Focusing on adaptation: engaging directly with people’s lived experience of climate changes and their solutions and adaptations to new ways of living.

The first stage of Suitcase Stories involved providing the young people with access to stories, experiences and insights from different contexts in the global North and global South. These differed to some of the dominant climate change narratives in being, where possible, unmediated (such as exchanging questions with young people in Nigeria) and focused on stories of adaptation and of immediate impacts and responses. This kept engagement pragmatic and practical, avoiding abstract and intangible concepts.

We also found evidence that it built empathy, collaborative learning and a solutions orientation.

"I feel like people should be more respectful of what's happening in other countries. Just because you're not affected by it doesn't mean they're not either."

"It's hard to adapt to different things. You know, no matter how big or how small the change is, it's going to be hard to adapt in some way. But we've all got to learn to adapt because otherwise there's no hope for our planet anymore."

2. Storytelling and agency: through supporting young people to become storytellers, providing them with skills, leadership and a sense of agency.

The second stage of Suitcase Stories involved supporting the young people in developing storytelling performances about climate adaptation. Learning how to tell stories provided the young people with immediate skills (such as confidence, public speaking, collaboration) which they valued and appreciated. More than that, however, telling stories about our world helps us construct and share meanings and emotions and builds a sense of agency – of being in control of our narrative. Again, the young people recognised this, discussing how it developed their leadership skills and reduced their sense of anxiety.

"The skills that we've learned, are like, how to tell a story and like how to tell the story in a big audience. And not to be, like, shy."

"The entirety of storytelling just brings much more than just information can, it really like draws you in with the emotions, and really makes you feel what that person feels, which sort of makes you understand it better. So I think just a story on the whole of these people, these things that they've been through."

"From the project, I feel like I've really worked on actually working on my leadership skills. So, you know, by enabling myself to think of this issue in Australia, and influencing that, and students younger than me, and actually being able to work with students younger than me, was really inspiring."

"And I think I've learned on how I can pick up on issues and like how they can be solved. Looking at it more into what can be done and the people around it. So I now I look more into kind of like what can be done instead of more - what can be done and how can we solve it - instead of more, kind of like, being upset about it."