The recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report (Allan, Hawkins, Bellouin, & Collins,2021) paints a grim picture for the future of our world. Although schooling can play a significant role in addressing how young people can learn about the topic of climate change and learn how to take action, this is routinely poorly addressed (Silova, Komatsu & Rappleye, 2018). In the ”Change the Story” project, an Erasmus+ cooperation, we intend to show children and adolescents digital ways of expressing their opinions, fears and hopes. By making use of digital storytelling, we aim to empower young people and give them the opportunity to make their voices heard not only on a local but also on a global stage. Through this aim the project aligns also with the intentions expressed through global citizenship education which describes how learners develop the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to secure a future world that is more just, peaceful and sustainable. In this contribution, we will share an examination of digital stories that were produced as part of this project by Austrian school children. In our analysis we applied Transformative Global Citizenship Education (Truong-White & McLean, 2015) as a framing paradigm. We found that the approach taken in this study, namely for students to examine climate challenges by looking first at the past and the present in order to describe the challenges of the future was a useful model that supported students’ story production. However, the focus on digital story telling made this learning task more complex for the students. We found that producing a digital story was at times competing with the focus on examining issues, analyzing causes or impacts of local and global problems, and identifying ways to respond. We present examples of digital stories that highlight the connection between justice, globalization, democracy and climate change and will share the frameworks we used to support teachers and students.

Allan, R. P., Hawkins, E., Bellouin, N., & Collins, B. (2021). IPCC, 2021: Summary for Policymakers. Truong-White, H., & McLean, L. (2015). Digital storytelling for transformative global citizenship education. Canadian Journal of Education,38(2), n2.