Rooted and Rising: A Pedagogical Narrative Inquiry into Re-Storying Education in the Era of Climate Change

As my relationship with global climate change grows deeper, I find myself increasingly intrigued by how this era compels a fundamental re-storying of education. In pursuit of this inquiry, I co-created Rooted and Rising – a pedagogical experiment in supportive education with and for youth climate leaders – and took up research within and alongside it. Through this dissertation, I sought to better understand the foundational narratives of this experiment, and what they might offer into the re-storying of education at this very pivotal time in global history. I collected data through a Pedagogical Narrative Inquiry, which explores the storied experiences of students and educators in Rooted and Rising (R+R), including my own, using interviews, document analysis, field notes, and personal reflections. My inquiry contributes to re-storying and re-structuring education as prefigurative, understood as the deliberate and experimental implementation of desired futures in the here and now. I offer three sets of significant narratives towards this re-storying: Interconnecting and the opening practices of valuing, attending, and sustaining interconnecting; Social Action narratives including processual narratives of improvisation and tinkering, social narratives of collaboration, and planetary healing narratives that both framed and emerged in the experiment; and Desired Futures, reflecting with R+R’s pedagogical invitations into play, desire, and agency with futures, and the aesthetics, temporalities, and well beings students’ expressed desire for across three activities. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.