Description
Despite young people’s activism to end fossil foolery, as evidenced by the recent global youth climate strikes and Indigenous resistance to energy developments globally, education towards energy futures is only beginning to move past scientifically-oriented energy education to engage with energy justice that addresses systemic injustice and historic inequities that reinforce global financial and oil and gas industrial interests. Youth articulate their dismay at a “futureless future” (Goldberg, 2021) as the only imagined option. While climate and energy education is increasingly oriented towards justice, many of the justice frameworks are still rooted in western liberal notions of individualism and the project of modernity built on domination, extraction, and the separation of (some) humans from the rest of nature. These systems and their ontological foundation are inherent to the climate crisis and are thus inadequate to its undoing (Stein et al., 2020).
This paper challenges current education curriculum and pedagogy that limit the potential for education that supports youth’s anticipation of the future (Miller et al, 2018) and presents a study of education for a just energy future by drawing on a 7-month collaborative education project on “Energy Futures,” which engaged hundreds of high school classes in 18 countries through an online networked global classroom. Using a digital platform, videoconferencing, and instant messaging tools, students participated in a layered process that addressed both local realities and interconnected systems, coming face-to-face with the experiences, values, positions, and expectations of young people in diverse contexts in order to begin to understand how energy systems link us all unevenly together - and how we might together make a just energy transition. Through comprehensive analysis of the curriculum development process as well as student artwork, videos, written work, and presentations, and interviews with participant students and teachers, this paper draws on networked global learning experiences to reconceptualize energy justice as a contribution to a liveable future.
