UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE

This research group recognizes the important role that ecologically themed fiction plays in teaching young learners about sustainability-oriented topics in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. It aims to provide knowledge and resources that will assist teachers in making informed decisions about how to incorporate climate fiction (CliFi) into their lessons. This includes

• systematizing selected CliFi novels, graphic novels, comics and picture books aimed at children and young adults
• building a CliFi library in the English Department II
• creating a compendium for teaching CliFi in the EFL-classroom
• developing tools for teachers to select suitable CliFi for learners of diverse abilities and different ages
• designing modules and workshops about teaching CliFi in the EFL-classroom for interested English teachers

The project draws on prior work in the project group Cultures of Climate at UoC's Wissenschaftsforum zu Köln und Essen as well as on results from a previous project, Climate Change Literacy, funded by the VolkswagenFoundation, and it is linked with the ongoing teff academy as well as UNESCO's BRIDGES programme.

(Habilitation project)

We are steering towards a future in which the destruction of plant life will signal the end of all earthly life – or at least require the radical transformation and adaption of it. If our children are to anticipate and cope with increasingly uncertain futures, then they need to deal with the possibility of human vulnerability in a dying as well as deadly botanical world. This habilitation project starts from the premise that literary visions of dark vegetal futures open an imaginative and affective space, one which offers promising teaching incentives to help students develop the resiliency needed to navigate through emotions such as fear, guilt, worry, and anger in a time on the brink of mass extinction. By exploring the cultural-ecological, affective, and pedagogical affordances as well as the challenges of the negative aesthetics of plant horror, this project intends to answer the following questions:

• How are negative vegetal encounters imagined and narrated in contemporary works of children’s and young adult fiction?

• Which perspectives do such narratives open on social imaginaries of the vegetal future?

• What kind of (inter)generational fears about and conflicts over the environmental crisis are inscribed into children’s and young adult plant horror?

• Why and how should we teach plant horror in schools and what challenges arise for selecting appropriate reading materials for the literature and language classroom?

• To what extent can an engagement with literary plant horror foster students’ future literacy in the context of the cross-curricular task of Education for Sustainable Development?

(in collaboration with MESH, ALEKI, and CAIV)

This international conference addresses ethical, philosophical, pedagogical and aesthetic questions regarding the relevance of plants in children’s and young adult ecofiction. It seeks to explore how vegetal encounters are re-imagined for a younger readership against the backdrop of a deepening environmental crisis. Since the conference tries to forge a dialogue between ecocritical research and literature and language pedagogy, it intends to investigate what primary and secondary school teachers can do to address the troubled relationship between human beings and the vegetal world in (foreign) language learning contexts.

Click here for more information on the event.