Imagining sustainable climate futures : a mixed-methods study of an "engineering fiction" learning experience
Keywords: Education.

The lackluster response to the climate crisis in Western industrialized nations has been called a double failure of imagination. First is a failure to perceive the severity of the climate crisis, since climate change is often construed as psychologically distant (i.e., more likely to impact strangers in remote locations and times), which reduces connection to emotions that typically drive concern and action. Second is a failure to collectively envision pathways toward sustainable futures. In an effort to overcome these failures of imagination, I created a learning experience that integrated engineering and speculative fiction writing to leverage their complementary strengths. Fiction facilitates a form of mental simulation characterized by cognitive and emotional immersion into a story world, which can engender empathy for characters and visceral experience of climate-changed worlds. Additionally, engineering and speculative fiction are both ontological design tools. Engineering is concerned with imagining new socio-technical systems, but solutions are often incremental and techno-solutionist. Speculative fiction is concerned with the transformative, imagining alternative worlds and their societal implications, but visions of the future are often dystopian or, if utopian, lack details of how to get from "here" to "there". The intervention consisted of ten 80-minute sessions that guided 48 high school students in developing solutions and stories depicting societal transformations toward sustainable climate futures 50 years from now. My analysis approach was inspired by research on collective creativity, which suggests that a full theoretical account of collective imagination must consider three levels of analysis: (1) individual imaginative acts, (2) interactional dynamics over time, and (3) the emergence of collective group products. I analyzed collective imagination using three different lenses, each of which is presented in individual papers. In the first paper, I explored individual imaginative acts and interactional dynamics over time to capture the emergence of collective climate imagination using a complex systems approach. Imagination involves disengagement of consciousness from the here-and-now of a proximal experience to mentally represent objects, ideas, images, and states of the world that are not present or that cannot be perceived with the senses. As a distributed social process, imagination emerges from the interaction of a system comprising people, tools, and their environment. Typical approaches for investigating collaborative learning and problem solving neglect the dynamics of how individual interactions give rise to the emergence of group-level behaviors. In the present study, I used qualitative methods to code group discourse data at two levels of analysis: individual cognition at the level of a talk turn, and collective imagination at the level of a discursive episode. I employed three nonlinear computational analysis techniques to examine the time series data: sliding window entropy, state space grids, and lag sequential analysis. The findings suggest that: (1) group interaction processes exhibited characteristics of a complex dynamic system, (2) the intervention facilitated traversal of psychological distance and the emergence of collective imagination, (3) the emergence of collective imagination was associated with a flow of ideas among participants, and (4) group members' ideas drew upon existing cultural artifacts. In the second paper, I analyzed products of collective imagination (in this case, student- authored fiction stories) to examine the hypothesis that the intervention would reduce the psychological distance of climate change. Efforts to make climate change more relevant by highlighting local impacts (known as proximizing) have yielded mixed results. My intervention instead engaged students' in empathizing with psychologically distant others (known as bridging) by writing stories that depicted characters who are highly vulnerable to climate change. I developed a novel analysis method that quantified linguistic abstractness (which is directly related to psychological distance) of participant authored stories using natural language processing techniques. The results suggest that the analysis method avoided the inconsistencies of previous attempts to measure psychological distance and that the fiction writing intervention had a large, significant effect on reducing the psychological distance of climate change. In the third paper, I analyzed collective group products to investigate the effect of the intervention on epistemological and ontological decolonization of students' climate change imaginations. Dominant approaches to climate education privilege scientific knowledge (epistemological colonization), which divorces climate change from emotions that typically drive concern and action, and dominant visions of the future obscure the possibility of collective socio-political transformation (ontological colonization). Students wrote three short climate fiction stories: an individually-authored story during the introductory session, a group-authored story during the introductory session, and a group-authored story written throughout the remainder of the intervention. I performed qualitative content analysis of these stories to identify relevant themes. I also administered a pre-post survey using a quasi-experimental design with an active control group: a different high school science class in the same district who completed a traditional science-based unit on climate change. The findings suggest that the intervention facilitated both epistemological and ontological decolonization of participants' imaginations about climate change. I end by discussing the theoretical, methodological, and practical contributions of this work. The results of this study could inform the design of similar learning experiences that seek to inspire broader collective imagination of just and sustainable climate futures