Despite the increasing interest in climate change topics, educators are reported facing significant challenges in the design and implementation of climate change education due to the lack of a comprehensive, widely-applicable educational approach. Teachers tend to rely on public resources such as NGO websites, activist videos and eco-documentaries to design teaching and learning activities to engage students in climate change education. Since climate change topics are commonly discussed and debated in media discourses, scholarly attention has been paid to the necessity of media literacy in the development of climate literacy – "in order to be climate change literate, the public must first be media literate" (Cooper, 2011, p. 235). In this direction, drawing on social semiotics (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), the current study suggests that in order to be mediate literate, a reader/viewer must be multimodal literate, because a media text is typically a configuration of a number of semiosis (e.g., language, image, music, shot editing, camera angle). This presentation aims to introduce a metalanguage toolkit for teachers to select, implement and evaluate eco-documentaries for educational purposes. The toolkit will provide both educators and students multimodal lenses to understand how a wide range of semiotic modalities are carefully selected and configured into a cohesive filmic text, and how the filmic text effectively serves the climate change activist purpose. This toolkit will be illustrated by two documentary examples: one is the representation of scientific certainty in climate change theory; the other is the representation of collectivity in social change.

Authors:
Tingjia Wang, Hiroshima University, Japan

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Tingjia Wang is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at Hiroshima University in Japan

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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