13: Cultivating Complex Climate Understandings Through Digital Video Response

This chapter presents one English educator’s pairing of digital video response with young adult eco narratives to open spaces for dialogue and civic exploration of climate change related issues: water security, species endangerment, etc. The chapter begins with a review of research exploring the potentials of critical digital literacies for civic engagement in the English language arts classroom, as well as the importance of providing hands-on digital media production for teacher candidates to explore their own emerging civic and professional identities. The chapter presents an overview of the course focus on multimodal composing and civic engagement and then provides three illustrative examples of how teacher candidates used digital video composing to cultivate nuanced and complex understanding of climate change and emerging civic stances related to climate inquiry and action.