Enhancing Intergenerational Communication Around Climate Change

Communication between children and adults can play a significant role in evolving understandings of climate change. The Manchester Environmental Education Network (MEEN) is committed to facilitating intergenerational communication around climate change in conjunction with primary and secondary schools in the North West of England, UK. MEEN and academics at the University of Manchester have come together to gain insights into the intergenerational communication that can evolve the understandings that children and adults need to address climate-change related issues. We wish, particularly to understand whether the children-led, knowledge-based approach that MEEN uses on some projects is an effective way of achieving this aim. As a means of exploring this question, the paper uses ‘vignettes’, evocative episodes that act as prompts for analysing the dynamics of the projects. It also draws on a growing body of literature around intergenerational relations relating it specifically to climate change communication (e.g. Mannion 2016; Blanchet-Cohen and Reilly 2016; Wyness 2013). Our explorations of the vignettes have led us to the view that ‘reciprocally responsive’ intergenerational communications is pivotal to negotiating understandings of climate change and how to act in the face of it.