Making Climate Justice Count: Teaching with Data Stories for Action

A compelling vision for reimagining climate change education through the intertwined practices of data storytelling and justice-centered learning

In Making Climate Justice Count, Asli Sezen-Barrie, Mary K. Stapleton, and Hosun Kang address a central problem in climate change education: the disconnect between data-driven science instruction and students' lived, cultural, and emotional understandings of climate impacts.

As our capacity to generate and visualize data grows, so does our responsibility to teach students not only how to use data but how to care about it, question it, and apply it with integrity. Too often, data are presented as objective and detached instead of being actively shaped by the experiences they represent--or exclude. This book offers a pathway to bridge that gap by showing how storytelling can humanize data and make it meaningful across diverse contexts. By meaningfully engaging with climate change data, and collecting local data of their own, students gain a deeper understanding of how knowledge is produced and used in decisions that matter to their communities.

Arguing that climate change education must be rooted in both data and in the lived stories of communities most affected by environmental change, the authors provide evidence-based pedagogical strategies that educators can utilize to create innovative, effective, and engaging lessons. Chapters offer rich, real-world examples of data-focused and justice-centered instructional design, all of which emerged from collaborations between the authors and a range of colleagues, including classroom teachers, research scientists, and community members. Ultimately, this book positions data storying as both a pedagogical method and a moral stance for advancing transformative, justice-oriented climate education in schools.