What is educational about a climate emergency?

Abstract

Education research has been increasingly concerned about the role of instrumentalism in defining education. Within the context of the climate emergency, conceiving of education instrumentally positions educated subjects as actors capable of minimising the effects of climate change. This article is not critical of actions that mitigate the climate emergency. However, within the research that resists the instrumentalization of education, the climate emergency requires a status different from its role as an end that orients the content and practices of education. By asking what is educational about the climate emergency, this article focuses on the emergence rather than the urgency of climate change as a way for education to carry on as the climate emergency continues to present unforeseen challenges of living together. The article concludes with the irreducibility of conflict to an emergent understanding of the educational, a feature that commits education to an incomplete and porous world.