Talking about climate change extinction is pedagogically valuable

This absence brings to mind Haraway’s observation that in these times of climate crisis, extinctions and ecological collapse, there is an ‘unprecedented looking away’ (Haraway 2016, 35), a refusal to know and ‘to be present in and to onrushing catastrophe in time’ (2016, 35). We argue that while others may look away, educators must critically face up to anthropogenic ecological disruption, including extinction, so that current and future generations can grapple with ecological uncertainty and precarity (Jickling et al. 2018; Lloro-Bidart 2015). Educators may be reluctant to turn towards extinction based on the expectation that young children should be distanced, shielded and protected from death and loss (Affifi and Christie 2019). This shielding is seen in early childhood learning settings which, as Iris Duhn (2012) observes, ‘are often prime sites where the discourses of protection, vulnerability and innocence create a highly controlled and closely monitored environment… which can lead to resistance when it comes to addressing potentially challenging, complex topics’ (20). This narrative of protection is also political. The Australian Prime Minister recently voiced his worry that the public discourse on climate change, including school student climate change protests, were unnecessarily making children anxious (Glenday 2019). We suggest, however, that turning a blind eye and deaf ear to what confronts us all is a greater threat to children.

Of course, we don’t mean to suggest that extinction is not being taught. Our concern is that some prevalent approaches to science teaching around the environment and extinction may be insufficiently disruptive of Western binaries and insufficiently grounded in the lives of children. We echo a concern of a recent literature review of climate change education that found that top-down, knowledge-focused (science) and didactic teaching dominated, despite the need for participatory, affective and creative pedagogies based in children’s local environments (Rousell and Cutter-MacKenzie-Knowles 2020). In our experience, children are often taught about the loss of the dinosaurs and the catastrophic Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago. They may also be taught the extinctions of individual species occurring in the recent past, typically on account of their failure to adapt to environmental change (see for example, https:// www.forteachersforstudents.com.au/site/themed-curriculum/endangered-wildlife/). We suggest that pedagogical approaches could better recognise that extinction and the threat of loss are part of children’s present, everyday and future lives, and that life and death are woven together (Affifi and Christie 2019). Moreover, encountering extinction in the sense offered by Extinction Studies invites educators and children to relearn the world as an ongoing entanglement of biocultural relations and to trouble their ways of knowing and being.2