Helping students express their feelings about the climate crisis

These in-their-own-words pieces are told to Patricia Lane and co-edited with input from the interviewee for the purpose of brevity.

Luiza Salek is using art to help high school teachers provide a platform for students to express their feelings about the climate crisis. As part of the first UBC Climate Studies and Action cohort, Luiza and three other students in collaboration with the BC Teachers Federation, designed the Climate Art Challenge. Luiza is also a UBC Climate Storytelling Fellow and with her colleagues is preparing for Communicating Climate Hope, a conference at the University of British Columbia (UBC) on August 14-16, 2024.

Tell us about the Climate Art Challenge.

Children are learning about the climate and nature emergencies at the same time they are told they are expected to deal with climate challenges. That heavy load is linked to elevated risks of depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress. The Climate Art Challenge offers innovative and potentially transformative ways to educate children that will also mitigate mental health and promote wellbeing. Using arts-based storytelling, the project is based on Indigenous teaching that the climate crisis is less a technical problem and more a relational one. Research shows students can use art to connect with their emotions in both active and reflexive ways and explore hope in justice-oriented actions. This form of education might interrupt the reproduction of colonial futures and foster a deeper sense of social and ecological responsibility.

This all sounds pretty complex but the project itself is simple. Teachers download a lesson plan to help them guide students in creating a piece of art demonstrating their feelings about climate change. Teachers cover the basics of the causes and impacts of climate change and help students research how different communities, including their own, are both impacted and developing resilience. Each student is encouraged to keep a visual journal over a two- to four-week period, documenting their feelings as they explore the topics. Once completed the main art projects are exhibited in class with a discussion about their experience and how art helped them engage with complex issues and emotions. The Challenge culminates in a community display allowing parents, other students, administrators and community members to observe and engage with the work. Students are encouraged to continue their visual journals to track news and accompanying emotions for the remainder of the semester or the year.

Tell us about some of your other projects.

I am involved in Ritmos Climáticos helping climate-aware Latinex students stay connected with our cultures as a way of building resilience. My studies are at the intersection of Indigenous storywork and land-based education and I am a junior researcher at the Indigenous Food Security Working Group.

How did you get interested in this work?

I grew up in Rio de Janeiro. When I was 16, I went with 15 other young people to spend three weeks with an Indigenous community in the Amazon Rainforest. As I slowed down, I was able to integrate the very different stories I had grown up with as a child of Brazilian settler culture. I understood for the first time that city dwellers might be comparatively rich in material wealth but this community, despite violent colonization, has maintained kin and land-based connections that gives them riches of an entirely different sort. If poverty is defined by being unable to share, in many ways our settler cultures are worse off because our belief systems prevent us from doing that. I want to spend my life encouraging a deeper connection to the land and the water because I believe that radical sharing is the essence of community and it is community that will save us all.

What makes this work hard?

Our dominant culture tells a story of climate change as a technical problem with technical solutions. I tell stories of relationships and it can be hard to witness the damage wrought by colonial, capitalist extractivism born from the separation of people from the land. It is very upsetting that the most marginalized, least-contributing communities will be the soonest and hardest impacted.

What gives you hope?

So many of us have our shoulders to the wheel helping to shift things and to take new directions. We are holding each other through the suffering at the centre of our work.

What is your vision for a better world?

There is a small garden at UBC which is tended by the Musqueam people. When you are there, you understand the land is the centre, and we are a part of it. That is my vision - our world becomes able to reclaim that connection.

What would you like to say to other young people?

Listen to stories of people who are not like you. Find commonality through shared connection to the land. We all have it. Sometimes it takes stories to uncover it.

What about older people?

COVID-19 has moved us apart and the world seems more polarized than before. We must reclaim the wellbeing that comes from standing face to face and side by side with all generations, asking the deep questions and learning how to listen to each other and the Earth in such difficult times