Preparing Today’s Climate Change Generation: A Qualitative Study on Using Archives for K–12 Informal Disaster Education

Abstract

As the global climate crisis continues to worsen, what avenues exist for young people, many already managing physiological, social, and emotional hardships, to learn how to navigate some of the worst outcomes of this crisis—disasters? Experiencing natural disasters, defined as an event brought on by environmental changes that can cause widespread damage and disruption to a person and communities, in particular, can intrinsically impact an individual’s ability to make sense of their world and who they are within this world (Self-Brown et al., 2017). Considering the relational breach many young people experience in connection to the natural environment due to historical factors such as mass human migrations, deforestation, biodiversity loss, and soil erosion, young people have lost the human and more-than-human networks necessary for their own learning and growth. In particular, an affective dis/connection from and to the natural environment heavily influences how young people develop into healthy and happy adults, including the acquisition of skills, the regulation of emotional and physiological well-being, the strengthening of cognitive abilities, and the improvement of overall social and emotional health (Ullrich, 2019; Ardoin et al, 2022). In an attempt to identify more ways to repair these relational fissures and facilitate better youth engagement in climate change actions, my dissertation explores the benefits of and current obstacles to using archival records in K–12 informal learning settings to support young people’s disaster preparation skills and domain knowledge. This study, through focus group interviews with Washington-based archivists and middle to high school educators and students, archival research, and a self-study of my own disaster education curriculum, examined the possibilities and limitations of using archival records as a key disaster and climate change education tool. Motivated by the urgency of the climate crisis, this study calls for multifaceted pedagogical and documentary tactics to curb factors contributing to climate change, including individual illiteracy on the topic, the prioritization of short-term profit over long-term care of living beings, and institutional inertia preventing cultural change. Despite the immensity and complexity of this dilemma and crisis, research findings from this study demonstrate a few paths forward. Firstly, the cultivation of intimate and affective connections to archival records serves as a vital motivator for young people and educators engaging with disaster narratives. Unfortunately, findings also showed how existing archival collections systematically discourage these intimate affective bonds due to the longstanding marginalization of young people through institution-driven documentation and recordkeeping patterns I term archival subjection. Despite these representational and accessibility barriers, archival instruction using youth-centered records, when embedded in socio-emotional, place-based pedagogy, can function as meaningful K–12 disaster education tools.