The paper presents preliminary findings and reflections on the partnership and collaboration between students, teachers and university researchers in a citizen science project called “Stories from the future. Digital storytelling and critical climate change education”. This Sparkling Science Project is funded by the Austrian Ministry for Education, Science and Research to promote cooperation between schools, research institutions and society. The project will run for three years (Sep. 2024 to Aug. 2027) as a cooperation between the University of Graz and the St. Leonard Digital School, an urban middle school in Graz, Austria. The project’s objective is to develop an innovative and creative approach to climate change education through (feminist) participatory research (Prasad 2020), digital storytelling, and based on the concrete realities of young people’s lives. Theoretically, the project is anchored in feminist new materialism, especially Haraway's (2016) notions of the entanglement of human, nature and technology and her combination of science and storytelling and in a pedagogy of hope (Freire 2021, hooks 2003). The central research questions in the project are: How can participatory research promote hopeful and caring climate change education? How can researched-based storytelling contribute to a creative and playful approach to climate change education? How can climate change education be conceptualized as political, philosophical and media education?

The project aims to democratize narratives of climate change and to highlight the importance of hearing the voices of youth. Hopeful climate education means acknowledging the vulnerability of subjects and the planet but not as without alternative. Instead of persisting in the catastrophic narrative, it is about learning “response-ability” (Haraway 2015) to urgent questions of the present. As for Haraway and Freire it is therefore central to understand the present as not closed, but as a kind of opening into the future. In the sense of a pedagogy of hope it is important to focus on the lives and everyday worlds of young people and their questions and concerns, to develop “literacies of power” (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell 2008, 106) that connect the personal and the political, but do not lead to despair. For it is not a matter of postulating hope, but of anchoring it in concrete practice (Freire 2021, 11). In addition to knowledge, courage and vision, hope also requires opportunities for action. In the project we therefore understand hope as something that can and has to be learned – by students, teachers and researchers alike.

In the project students collaborate with their teachers and the university researchers when they are working on their own research projects and engage in digital storytelling based on their research. We understand the difference between university researchers, teachers and students with regard to power, kinds of knowledge and responsibility, and reflect on these differences and how they are brought into in the research process. We are working towards a collaborative partnership with students, for “the potential for transformation is more likely to reside in arrangements which require the active engagement of students and teachers working in partnership than in those which either exclude teachers or treat student voice as an instrument” and working with “students as co-researchers cannot succeed without the engagement of students as … makers of meaning” (Fielding 2004, 306).

The project uses (feminist) participatory action research (F)PAR, which involves all participants in the entire research process wherever possible and views research as a joint learning process (Prasad 2020). We combine F(PAR) with critical pedagogy of hope and feminist pedagogies of care (hooks 1994, 2003, 2010) with regard to questions of partnership between university researchers, teachers and young people. We argue that they are compatible since research and learning are understood as an emancipatory collaborative process starting from the concerns and needs of the participants and their knowledge. We also ascribe to an ethical approach to our research process characterized by responsiveness and reactiveness, underpinned by a moral consciousness of cultures and people (Otrel-Cass 2020). Drawing on Max Scheler’s notion of material value ethics (Scheler as cited in Otrel-Cass 2020), our partnership with the students is shaped through constant negotiations where we take care of emerging reluctances in case they occur. Throughout the project research laboratories are organized to accompany the research process: from building a research team, finding a research question by doing a fantasy journey into the future and philosophizing about the good life, acquiring social science methods skills in a student-friendly way (Wöhrer et al. 2018) to learning about digital storytelling in a creative and technological sense. The paper presents the onboarding and our adoption of the process of PATHing (Lewthwaite et al. 2010), a joint negotiation process involving the main stakeholders (university researchers, students, teachers) about the collaboration and direction of the project. Lewthwaite at al. (2010, 14) describe it as a process of collectively discussing and negotiating aspirations” to identify “strengths; weaknesses; and steps towards achievement of goals”. For the PATHing process, we use a roll of paper as “boundary object” between university researches and students throughout the research process. “Boundary objects are objects which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites” (Star & Griesemer 1989, 393). We will present the PATHing process and analyze data from the first research laboratory in the project, specifically three meetings between the university researchers and three classes, where the goals of the project were discussed. Data was collected through video and audio recordings, fieldnotes and taking photos of joint material productions.

Based on our observations, we will present three challenges for student-university researcher partnerships. The first challenge addresses issues of (dis)trust when forming a “learning community” (hooks 1994) and a “community of inquiry” (Lipman 2003). We found that sharing vulnerabilities can support the building of trust (hooks 2010). For instance, during the introductions in small groups at the beginning of the first research workshop, two girls were rather reluctant. At some point they asked one of the university researchers how she felt when she was their age, and the university researcher shared that she was not doing so well at that time because she had a difficult dynamic in class. This opened up a conversation about issues that mattered to the students like war, peace and friendship. The second challenge is that the university researchers assumed that raising the topic of climate change might evoke strong reactions or feelings, perhaps even outrage or hopelessness, However, we realized that we had to start by identifying the things that were important to the lives of young people including computer games, soccer, opportunities to travel to Serbia to visit relatives, and the importance of money to lead a good life, before linking this back to the topic of climate change. Third, we will discuss the challenge of how to develop “literacies of power” concerning climate change and the “imperial mode of living” (Brand & Wissen 2021) in a sensitive way when working with students who may be socioeconomically disadvantaged. How to deal with the imbalance of harmful climate behavior between privileged and disadvantaged countries and people, an imbalance that most likely can also be found between university researchers, teachers and students? We argue that addressing these challenges is important to move beyond “false generosity” (Freire 1973) and develop more critical approaches in climate change education.

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