Literature for Change: How Educators Can Prepare the Next Generation for a Climate-Challenged World

Deadline: August 1st, 2020
Contact: Rebecca Young, Editor, Literature for Change, Cognia; International Baccalaureate Organization
Email: ryoung1@binghamton.edu

Essays or K-12 lesson/unit plans analyzing how literature frames a specific environmental concern are invited from educators around the world. Contributions will be organized in an instructional follow-up resource to Confronting Climate Crises: Reading Our Way Forward (2018). Intended to support educators’ implementation of literature-based interdisciplinary climate instruction, the project is titled Literature for Change: How Educators Can Prepare the Next Generation for a Climate-Challenged World. The collection will be published by Lexington Books, a division of Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

If you are interested in sharing a piece for consideration, please email a draft with the subject line Literature for Change by August 1st, 2020 to Ryoung1@binghamton.edu.

Contributors will be asked to prepare finalized selections by October 1st, 2020. If copyrighted work is included, it is the responsibility of contributors to obtain appropriate permissions by the submission deadline.

Submission Details

Essays or lesson/unit plans should analyze the ways a particular text/film (or group of works) handles an environmental concern. Submissions should explore the ways in which the literature helps frame the concern but may also be focused on patterns of human behavior that underlie or contribute to it—for example, studying the merits of scientific progress and human ambition in relation to effects on social connections and the natural environment.

Literature and film studied can represent any genre or reading level and may include an analysis of the work in its entirety or of a specific section or chapter that highlights the environmental concern. Analyses that explore how a group of works or a specific author handles a climate-related topic are also welcome.

Generally, topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: pollution (air, water, or soil); food (growth, production, distribution, or waste); climate migration and climate-related natural disasters; health and nutrition; species extinction or preservation; habitat conservation or loss; genetic engineering and GMOs; sea-level rise; impacts of plastic trash; deforestation; biodiversity concerns (ecosystems, food, species, medicinal resources); agricultural concerns (including land use, animals raised for food, climate changes); natural resources (distribution or loss of); human behavior relating to each other, other species, or the planet (population, consumption, innovation, technology, politics, economics, social or virtual connections, local and global citizenship).

Thank you very much for your time and interest in this project. A link to the publisher’s website and an abstract of Confronting Climate Crises can be found here: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498535960/Confronting-Climate-Crises-through-Education-Reading-Our-Way-Forward

Rebecca Young, PhD
Literature and Assessment Specialist for Cognia and the International Baccalaureate Organization
Editor, Literature for Change: How Educators Can Prepare the Next Generation for a Climate-Challenged World

Posted on May 11, 2020