Several scholars (Stein & Gafni 2015, Verlie 2019, Todd 2020 & Bergdahl and Langmann 2022) stress the importance of an educational space and time for confronting and dealing with existential concerns about climate change (CC). A space where existential questions can be considered, such as what it means to be human, and where it is possible to think about how things can be different. Despite the important work of the scholars above in identifying and describing the value and principles of a pedagogical space for students' existential concerns, little or no research focuses on developing detailed, precise knowledge about the didactic work required to create this specific pedagogical space. This includes knowledge about the choices teachers make about their purposes, the 'why' of the didactic work, the learning content a teacher presents, the 'what' of the didactic work, and the teaching methods and in situ interventions a teacher implements, the 'how' of the didactic work. It is precisely this kind of knowledge creation that this conference paper aims to contribute to.

Therefore, this paper describes a novel analytical approach to generating such knowledge in order to inspire future empirical investigations. Moreover, we illustrate this approach by means of an exploratory study of a Master's course in English Literature at a Belgian university, where the teacher deliberately chose to highlight the existential challenge of CC. In doing so, we generate detailed, empirically grounded knowledge about how a teacher can create a pedagogical space in the classroom to elicit the existential dimension of CC, or in other words, to "call the existential into existence".

The theoretical framework presented in this article consists first of the existential tendency in CCE and existential questions, which together provide a suitable framework for making visible the existential dimension of CC in CCE. The existential tendency in CCE (Vandenplas et al. 2023) presents a typology of different expressions of the existential in educational practice: Existential moment, Life quake, Existential dilemma, Existential deliberation, Existential reflection, and Existential norm. All these expressions share a focus on the existential as captured in the description, i.e. profound questions and choices about what life is and what really matters in life - both our personal lives and human existence in general - that may involve threats, fears and incompatible values. To further refine this "aboutness of the existential" in educational practice, we took inspiration from Van der Kooij et al.'s (2016) six existential questions: ontological questions, cosmological questions, theological questions, teleological questions, eschatological questions and ethical questions. Next we draw from transactional didactic theory (Van Poeck et al. 2023) for understanding and investigating the didactic work involved in eliciting the existential dimension. This theory, based on the pragmatist work of John Dewey, understands learning as being stimulated by a 'problematic situation'. For example, by encountering existential anxieties or dilemmas, or alternative perspectives on what life is, what it means to live, and how to live well, that one has never considered before. This triggers an 'inquiry' that can lead to new knowledge, skills, values and beliefs. The transactional theory of teaching, then, focuses on how teachers' actions, both in preparing for and delivering lessons, affect the encounters that take place and what students learn from them. This is understood in terms of the scripting of purposes and roles, the staging of a learning environment (objects of attention and activities), and the performance of interventions that help to guide students' learning.

The empirical data consists of forum posts of students, transcripts of video/audio-recorded observations of lessons, student assignments, and semi-structured interviews with the involved teacher. The first analytical step was to collect all the existential expressions in the data by using the description of the existential (see above). In the second and third analytical steps, we used the 6 existential questions and the categories of the existential tendency) as sensitising concepts to further specify the existential expressions. The fourth analytical step entailed investigating how teachers’ lesson design and interventions, i.e. their didactic work, contributed to eliciting existential questions and/or specific existential situations. At first, the focus was on identifying and describing the preparatory work done by the teacher, his scripting and staging. The second focus was the analysis of the performance, the actual educational activity, and how this performance relates to the teachers’ scripting and staging and thus also eliciting the existential. Firstly, we analysed the selected existential expressions in the classroom observations. Therefore we started with a Practical Epistemology Analysis (PEA - Wickman and Östman 2002) to analyse the meaning making. PEA starts from the idea that every time a person is confronted with a new situation, e.g. when a teacher asks a question or another student asks a question, a “gap” is created. The “gap” is thus something that does “not stands fast” for the student. PEA enables to unravel the creation of “relations” between what “stands fast” for a person - e.g. previously acquired knowledge, knowledge provided by the teacher, certain beliefs or ideas of the students - and what is new in an “encounter”. By analysing the relations thus created in order to close the gap, we can examine the meaning making towards and within diverse existential expressions. We then analysed how the teachers' actions, understood as actions in both scripting and staging as well as classroom interventions, privileged this meaning making or in other words influenced the creating of certain “relations”. After the classroom observations, we also analysed existential expressions in the forum posts and assignments with the sensitising concepts of 'environment in use', 'objects of attention' and 'ends in view', a purpose that students understand and act upon, to gain insight into the teacher's staging of a scene and task.

In the exploratory study we demonstrated our analytical research approach to the didactic work of the teacher in eliciting the existential in CCE. The analysis of the existential questions and situations showed that in the classroom there were mainly reflections on existential questions about (human) life in general, while in the assignments there were also reflections on personal existential questions such as teleological questions about the meaning in life and reflections on existential experiences. The analysis of the scripting showed that this teacher explicitly wanted students to analyse how literature deals with the existential challenge of climate change and the existential questions it raises. It also showed how the teacher gradually realised the importance of a space for students' own (reading) experiences. By staging a scene with the literary texts, the teacher draws attention to climate change as a concrete and tangible existential challenge. By staging a task for a forum post on the intersection between literature and theoretical readings, reflection on existential questions was expressed. With the input from the forum posts, the teacher then steered the privileging in the class. Thus, the teacher's didactic work created a space in which a lot of time was devoted to reflection on existential questions. And then it is remarkable that it was only after the staging of a task for the final assignment that reflections on the existential questions of the meaning in life, but also on previous existential experiences, emerged. Thus, this course clearly provided opportunities for different conceptions of "we" and "life" to emerge through reflection on existential questions, as well as for the student's "I" to emerge through reflection on existential experiences and questions of meaning in life.

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