Critical Media Literacy Analysis and Production for Systems Thinking About Climate Change

Introduction

As record-breaking temperatures are reported across the globe and extreme weather events are more common every year, the leading cause of this climate crisis, human-produced CO2 emissions, is still increasing. Not only have we not slowed down our extraction and use of fossil fuels, but we are burning more forests, producing more toxic emissions, and increasing the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere that are causing global warming. These changes have created our current climate crisis and are producing a growing awareness of the severity. A recent survey found that a majority of people interviewed in 110 countries reported that they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about climate change, believing that climate change will harm future generations “a great deal,” and positing that climate change was “extremely” or “very” important to them personally (Leiserowitz et al., 2022).

A national survey of 1,200 Gen Z youth indicated that 83% were concerned about adverse climate change effects in ways that impact their physical health (69%) and mental health (75%) (Dooley et al., 2021). They were particularly concerned about adverse climate change effects on air quality (60%), water pollution (59%), and plastic pollution (56%) and were “very concerned” about the loss of natural resources.

Young people are most likely to employ digital media for communicating their concerns about the climate crisis with both local and global audiences (Dunaway, 2015; Newell et al., 2016). Therefore, an effective critical response to media messages and the creation of alternative media for communication about the climate crisis should involve a robust educational program that prepares students to think critically and systematically about the messages they interact with daily.

Education and literacy have long been powerful tools for controlling and dominating or liberating and empowering people in all parts of the world. It is now more important than ever for teachers to play a significant role in the movement for climate justice. Educators need to shift the paradigm from the destructive anthropogenic domination of nature to a more sustainable understanding of our interdependence with the natural world.

In this report, we describe how undergraduate students and graduate preservice teachers in the co-authors’ education courses analyzed media through systems thinking about environmental justice and produced a range of media portraying their concerns about the climate crisis.

Critical Media Literacy Analysis of Systems Shaping Climate Change

We are already seeing youth and Indigenous communities leading movements for environmental justice and pushing for change. Engaging youth in effective media analysis and production about climate change can benefit greatly from the adoption of critical media literacy (CML) as a pedagogical approach that includes three essential components: 1) an awareness of how systems, structures, and ideologies reproduce hierarchies of power and knowledge concerning race, gender, class, sexuality, and other forms of identity and environmental justice, along with a general understanding about how media and communication function; 2) literacy practices to think critically, question media representations and biases, deconstruct and reconstruct media texts, and use a variety of media to access, analyze, evaluate, and create; and 3) a disposition for curiosity, inquisitiveness, skepticism, and critical engagement with the world, leading to a desire to take action to challenge and transform society to be more socially and environmentally just.

These components of CML align well with systems thinking that explores the interrelationships of the systems that shape society and organize structures, institutions, and ways of thinking. Systems thinking involves going beyond framing the climate crisis (hereafter CC) in terms of individual needs and actions to understanding the CC as shaped by energy production, economics, transportation, agriculture, urban design, media, legal, and political systems impacting ecosystems such as water, air, and food essential for life (Ingwersen et al., 2014; Jacobson et al., 2017; Lezak & Thibodeau, 2016; López, 2019). For example, a capitalist economic system is driven by the desire to achieve material/economic growth requiring resources that have negative impacts on ecological systems (Lehtonen et al., 2018). Within a capitalist system, corporations or companies depend on increased profits to sustain growth, resulting in their need to increase production regarding negative environmental impacts based on increased energy use and consumption (Klein, 2015). Similarly, our current transportation system based on individuals driving results in excessive emissions.

Engaging students in systems thinking therefore involves having them analyze how certain systems are driven by objects or motives that have negative environmental impacts (Engeström & Sannino, 2010). For example, students can examine the objects or motives of energy-production systems that are designed to produce fossil fuels that result in the release of methane from refineries, or within agricultural systems, methane from cows generates high levels of CO2. Given the adverse effects of deforestation for use in cattle grazing, reducing meat consumption by just 20% would lower deforestation rates by one-half by 2050, versus projected increases in deforestation (Reynolds, 2022). Moving to a more renewable energy production system entails a major shift in reframing and rethinking status-quo reliance on fossil fuels (Ingwersen et al., 2014), leading to considering the benefits of creating a “green economy” using wind, solar, and battery/fuel cell options (Smil, 2010). In one study, undergraduates learning to apply systems thinking over time moved toward an analysis of causal connections between energy and transportation systems producing greenhouse gases, increasing temperature, ice melt, and sea-level rise and impacts on humans (Breslyn & McGinnis, 2019).

Using Critical Media Literacy to Engage in Systems Thinking for Critiquing Climate Change Media Representations

Critical media literacy includes systems thinking analysis of how the media themselves, as an information communication system, portrays climate change effects of drought, sea rise, flooding, ice melt, heat, wildfires, etc. in ways that support or deflect the need to address climate change. For example, Hollywood movies employ “stories-we-live-by” such as “conquering the West” related to justifying the destruction of Native Americans who subscribe to the importance of living in harmony with nature (Stibbe, 2020). This logic of domination is an ideology that has been embedded in the political, economic, and legal systems since the founding of this country (Miller, 2008).

Organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, funded by the fossil fuel industry, use media to promote the concept of a “carbon footprint” focusing on individual actions associated with recycling or turning off light bulbs to shift the focus away from a systemic critique of energy, transportation, or agribusiness (Supran & Oreskes, 2021). These organizations also create misleading television ads and social media promoting the interests of the oil and gas industry, shaping norms for how people think about climate change as false equivalencies involving competing, “two-sided” perspectives (Spartz et al., 2017; Worth, 2021). When one side is based on an overwhelming majority of scientific evidence, then the inclusion of climate denialism as a balancing act is a logical fallacy that promotes disinformation and interferes with understanding reality.

Corporations also employ media to frame CC as a “political spectacle: citizens may passively observe from afar, but real control over policy lies within institutions and processes which are primarily responsive to powerful special interests” (Gunster, 2017, p. 60). This framing tends to marginalize and alienate audiences, given how “news about climate change often does little more than intensify feelings of anxiety, fear, alienation, and helplessness which are ultimately toxic to engagement” (p. 60). 

Given this status-quo framing by the media, Per Espen Stokes (2015) posits the need for analyzing and producing media for reframing systems through “ecological imagination” (Fesmire, 2010) related to reimagining sustainable systems (Ghosh, 2020; Wapner & Elver, 2016). For reframing or reimagining systems, students critique ideological or political media representations of systems shaping thinking about the CC. This can be a challenge to teach students who may not have studied critical theory because ideologies are often invisible and “tend to disappear from view into the taken-for-granted ‘naturalised’ world of common sense” (Hall, 2003, p. 90). Yet this challenge is a powerful opportunity to open students’ minds to alternative ways of thinking and creative solutions to difficult problems. As the levels of CO2 continue to increase, moving us deeper every day into the climate crisis, the need for students to learn how to question and challenge the systems and media that are contributing to the problem is paramount.

Adopting Critical Media Literacy (CML) for Analyzing Systems

Students can engage in critical media literacy (CML) for systems thinking using this framework of six conceptual understandings and corresponding questions (Kellner & Share, 2019):

1.         Social Constructivism: All information is co-constructed by individuals and/or groups of people who make choices within social contexts. WHO are all the possible people who made choices that helped create this text?

2.         Languages/Semiotics: Each medium has its own language with specific grammar and semantics. HOW was this text constructed and delivered/accessed?

3.         Audience/Positionality: Individuals and groups understand media messages similarly and/or differently, depending on multiple contextual factors. HOW could this text be understood differently?

4.         Politics of Representation: Media messages and the medium through which they travel always have a bias and support and/or challenge dominant hierarchies of power, privilege, and pleasure. WHAT values, points of view, and ideologies are represented or missing from this text or influenced by the medium?

5.         Production/Institutions: All media texts have a purpose (often commercial or governmental) that is shaped by the creators and/or systems within which they operate. WHY was this text created and/or shared?

6.         Social & Environmental Justice: Media culture is a terrain of struggle that perpetuates or challenges positive and/or negative ideas about people, groups, and issues; it is never neutral. WHOM does this text advantage and/or disadvantage?

The Centrality of the Learning Process

When students use this framework for analyzing and creating media about the climate crisis, they not only learn about environmental issues, but they are also engaging in pedagogical processes that develop their critical thinking skills and encourage a critical disposition for social action. As the CML conceptual understanding #6 suggests, media are never neutral and always advantage or disadvantage somebody.

Through producing media on the effects of the CC, students experience an enhanced re-seeing or reframing of the CC environmental impact in their daily lives (Littrell et al., 2022). For example, in portraying changes in images of familiar landscapes adversely impacted by flooding, sea rise, droughts, or forest fires, students are inviting audiences to recognize the disparities between previous and newly impacted landscapes due to the CC (Garner et al., 2016). Students creating videos about the CC that involved their re-seeing or reframing perceptions of their worlds led to the re-enactment of their sense of agency for engaging in activities related to promoting the need for adaptation and mitigation in their communities (Littrell et al., 2022).

Creating media offers students many benefits, such as increasing motivation and engagement, making learning accessible to more students through integrating the arts and multiple learning modalities, and promoting a sense of agency and empowerment as students choose their topics and create media that express their ideas and concerns. Media production also provides students an opportunity to apply their learning by putting their ideas into practice. These are all aspects of the learning process that enhance the pedagogical value, increase students’ interest, and make learning about systems thinking accessible to more students.

When students are encouraged to create alternative media that challenge problematic representations of the CC, they are learning that they can be agents of change to communicate their concerns to audiences beyond the classroom. They are also engaging in pedagogical processes based on CML by developing their critical thinking skills and adopting a critical disposition for social action. These are some of the positive potentials that media production and project-based learning (PBL) offer. When educators introduce PBL and assess student work, it is imperative for the academic integrity of the learning, that process is prioritized over product.

College Students Analyzing and Producing Media About the Climate Crisis

In this report, we provide examples of college students applying this CML framework for analyzing and creating alternative media in one of the co-author’s courses in the teacher education program for graduate students and also for the undergraduate students majoring in education at a large public university in the western United States. By combining theory from cultural studies and critical pedagogy with practical classroom applications of new digital media and technology, these courses attempt to prepare K-12 teachers and future educators to teach students how to critically analyze and create all types of media.

In these critical media literacy classes, students analyze a variety of media texts throughout the quarter to gain practice using the framework for engaging in systems thinking to critique all media. Based on their analysis, students produce media to reimagine systems, representing the non-human, natural worlds as significant as opposed to the typical media focus on humans, as well as portraying the exploitation and degradation of nature (Stibbe, 2020; Thevenin, 2020).

The core of this work is the CML framework that provides the theoretical lens for all learning and the guiding questions to direct the practice. Throughout the courses, students answer the six guiding questions about different media texts. In one activity, students pasted images of a media text of their choosing on a class Google Slides presentation and in the notes section below the image, they wrote their answers to the six CML questions (see Figure 1).

Creating Posters to Address Environmental Injustice

As students learn about the connections between CML and environmental justice, something Antonio López describes as ecomedia literacy (López, 2021), they explore different worldviews, ideologies, and myths about our relationship with nature. They analyze the many systems that shape our ideas and practices by questioning the influences of colonialism and capitalism on our society and media. Students investigate the inequality of the environmental effects that impact low-income communities far worse than wealthier groups. They question the myth of universal responsibility that falsely asserts we are all equally to blame for our current CC. They also learn about Indigenous scholars who address traditional ecological knowledge about living in non-hierarchical relationships with the natural world (Kimmerer, 2013). This exploration helps students recognize the dominant ideologies that too often are accepted as “normal” and thereby gain the power to influence the ways we read media. In the CML framework, conceptual understanding #4 about the politics of representation is designed to help students question these dominant ideologies. This is a helpful lens to analyze media representations of the systems and structures that promote sustainable or unsustainable practices.

In order to deepen their analysis and apply their learning, students create public service announcement posters that address problematic issues related to the climate crisis. They use systems thinking about an issue of their choice and design posters that explain the problems and possible solutions. The posters include strategic uses of visual images, color, typography, design, and print. For example, one student created a poster related to the need to expand the public transportation system given the excessive dependency on automobiles in Los Angeles (see Figure 2). Preservice teachers find this activity one of the easiest to take into their student-teaching classrooms since it allows them the flexibility to modify the content depending on the subject matter they are teaching.

Using Podcasts for Systems Thinking

Preservice teachers and undergraduate university students learn how to incorporate podcasting into education by creating podcasts that challenge problematic dominant media. They begin by learning the codes and conventions of aural literacy such as the differences between narration and dialogue, tone painting with music to create moods and position audiences, and the art of Foley to layer sound effects invisibly in movies, TV, video games, and most multimedia productions. Students use these elements of aural literacy when creating their own podcasts in different radio genres such as a call-in talk show, sporting event, news report, infomercial, traffic report, advertisement, song, etc.

We begin the lesson for creating podcasts by conveying different meanings of the same phoneme simply by changing one’s tone, intonation, and inflection. Then we put sounds together and voice the same word that can change meanings based on how the word is spoken, such as “bad” which can mean not good or excellent. This activity prepares students to play with punctuation as they read the same sentence several times with different intonations and pauses in order to see how the entire meaning of the sentence can change. After we have discussed the role of words in audio productions, we shift to exploring the ways music is used in movies for tone painting and sound effects are supported by the Foley artist. These building blocks of aural literacy provide students with scaffolding to construct their own podcasts.

Students are then encouraged to experiment with these techniques by creating podcasts that demonstrate their critical thinking about media and social issues. In one podcast, students told a story about two people hiking near a river and dropping their trash. Once the characters leave, the river speaks out and explains the problems of littering and deforestation. In another podcast, students pretended to be a call-in talk show discussing the pros and cons of reusable straws, when a green sea turtle calls the show to assert that their debate is missing the more important systemic issue because “the actual real problem that humans refuse to address is consumerism” (listen to this podcast at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kcd0Xd1aW-u3gK_Ry96xL4Ulj7Gtgb9i/view?usp=sharing). These activities create powerful opportunities to inspire a critical imagination and to demonstrate their understanding of the systems, structures, and politics of representation.

Creating Multimodal/Digital Stories

Students also create multimedia stories that allow them to incorporate the visual arts by drawing or using cartooning programs. There are many resources available for free online that can help students tell stories by creating cartoon strips that can also incorporate all the elements of sound. Students in the co-author’s teacher education course created cartoon storyboards using storyboardthat.com (see Figure 3).

In another CML class, students created collaborative digital stories by storyboarding their ideas on paper and then drawing illustrations to show the key moments in the story. Once they completed a handful of drawings, they recorded their narration and dialogue and inserted the sounds into a slide show presentation. The inclusion of the four elements of aural literacy mentioned above (dialogue, narration, sound effects, and music) can help students learn about the ways sound and visual elements work together. In one student-created digital story about a refinery polluting a local community, the narrator concludes the story by telling the audience: “And like many other families, Marco and his parents got to work. They organized, gathered, and stood up for the community they held so dear, determined not to let the refinery continue to impact their lives. They protested for their parents, their kids, the neighborhood they played in, and of course for Alex” (see Figure 4).

Creating Videos and Multimedia for Systems Thinking

In producing videos and multimedia, students may portray people coping with particular CC losses/effects, for example, the destruction of their houses due to tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, or flooding. Generating effective narratives through digital storytelling videos depends on how the video relates to viewers’ own prior knowledge/experience through 1) the use of familiar, identifiable people so that they can connect with those people’s experiences, 2) a clearly portrayed, imaginable plot, verisimilitude related to portraying lifelike, believable experiences, and framed in terms of familiar spaces/places (Gordon et al., 2018).

Preservice teachers in a Spanish university produced 13 videos with an ecofeminist perspective related to deforestation, biodiversity loss, fires, ocean contamination, enhancing their sustainability attitudes over time (Echegoyen-Sanz & Martín-Ezpeleta, 2021). College students enrolled in a climate change communication class perceived producing PSA videos as one of the most significant assignments in the course for learning about CC, with 68% indicating that producing the videos enhanced their attitudes and sense of efficacy related to addressing the CC (Rooney-Varga et al., 2014).

Adolescents benefit from creating videos based on receiving training on video production techniques they receive from teachers/adults (Littrell et al., 2020; Rooney-Varga et al., 2014; Tayne et al., 2020), in programs or projects such as Lens on Climate Change, Young People’s Trust for the Environment, The UK Youth Climate Coalition, Climate Change Education, Youth4Climate, Young Voices for the Planet, or Our Climate Our Futures. Producing videos on the CC as part of the Lens on Climate Change project at the University of Colorado enhanced students’ sense of agency and self-efficacy in their ability to employ multimodal composing skills for engaging in practices fostering change in audience knowledge and attitudes (Littrell et al., 2020; Tayne et al., 2020). It also helps students learn about how to consider their audiences’ perspectives in creating their videos (Gold et al., 2015).

A popular platform for sharing videos today is TikTok with some 800 million users. The biodiversity posts using the hashtag, “moss” about plant species and sustainability have had 84.3 million views (Mersinoglu, 2020). Central to TikTok’s appeal is the use of emotions evident in analyses of 6,560 videos based on the #ForClimate hashtag, the frequently employed stock photos, screenshots of articles, and voice-overs or music, for example, images related to the plight of sea turtles (Hautea et al., 2021). The most frequently coded videos served to “(1) convey the creator’s sincere concern for the environment or climate, (2) elicit such concern from the viewer, and/or (3) engage in activism-related activities” (p. 6).

In many ways, the short videos on TikTok are more similar to memes than they are to narrative movies. In the co-author’s courses, students created short TikTok videos to express their concerns by using popular TikTok videos as the template and adding their own visuals or sounds on top of them. An example is a 7-second TikTok video one group of students created in which they used the soundtrack from the viral TikTok in which a man walks past people doing something to a car and he asks, “What’s this?” They respond, “it’s an art project” and then he says, “Ok, I like it, Picasso.” The message communicates that something that seems out of the ordinary is being valued.

The students used this audio over their video of a person entering a classroom and seeing students learning about climate change in school while including print text on top of the video that states “teaching about climate change in schools.” This remix of a popular audio soundtrack with the students’ visual images conveys the idea that climate change is rarely taught in school and it should be. In just seven seconds, this type of TikTok meme communicates complex ideas based on previous templates that are more like multimedia thinking maps than traditional film genres.

Using Social Media for Communicating About Climate Change

Among social media users, younger generations are particularly active in using social media to communicate their concerns about the need to address global climate change (Field, 2021; Tyson et al., 2021) using #climatecrisis, #climatechange, or #OurChangingClimate to build coalitions through their online interactions (Boulianne et al., 2020; Napawan et al., 2017).

At the same time, students may have difficulty critically analyzing social media misinformation related to climate change. An assessment given to 3,446 high school students’ online-reasoning skills about the credibility of websites and media texts found that they struggled on all tasks, with less than 3% receiving a mastery score and the majority scoring at the lowest level (Breakstone et al., 2021). Researchers report that 96% of students believed in the content on a site because they failed to determine that the fossil-fuel industry created the site. This suggests the need for critical media literacy instruction to critique disinformation on climate change often supported by fossil fuel companies to mislead students and the need for investment in education to counteract this weakness. In their interactions, they may not necessarily adopt critical perspectives about their use of social media itself (Andersson & Ohman, 2016), suggesting the need for classroom instruction to apply criteria to ensure an inquiry process that addresses social and environmental justice by asking CML question #6: Whom does this text advantage and/or disadvantage?

Students in the co-author’s classes apply the CML framework to critically question dominant ideologies and systems, in order to challenge unjust representations. Students create a variety of media products from memes (see Figure 5) to zines that critically address the issues that most concern them (see the zine about solar punk at https://issuu.com/paaatrrick/docs/educ_187_alternative_media_project-2).

One of the most popular texts on social media are Internet memes that combine words and images through sampling, mashing, remixing, combining, and contrasting all types of media. While many memes are silly and playful, some are poignant and highly complex. On the website, KnowYourMeme.com students can research the context behind trending memes. In the co-author’s courses, students explore the way memes work as thinking maps to communicate layered messages based on common meme templates. There are numerous programs online to create memes that are free and easy. Students can create memes that address issues discussed in class or topics in which students are interested. Sometimes they might want to create media that they don’t want to share publicly and can use websites that provide templates that mimic the design of Instagram (https://generatestatus.com/generate-fake-instagram-post/), Twitter (https://www.tweetgen.com/), and Facebook (https://generatestatus.com/fake-facebook-post-generator/) (see Figure 6). This can allow students the freedom to create critical social media posts without fear of retribution or embarrassment, thereby lowering their affective filters and improving the learning process.

Transferring CML for Classroom Instruction

Students in the co-author’s classes are also drawing on their course CML experiences for learning to engage in teaching as future teachers. In one undergraduate education class, students who had previously taken the critical media literacy course volunteered to teach a session about critical media literacy to their peers. Six of the students became peer teachers and designed a lesson that combined CML with environmental justice.

The instructor spent several weeks meeting with the peer teachers to help them plan the lesson that they taught to all 35 of their peers. They had everyone work in teams to analyze environmentally problematic advertisements and then worked collaboratively to culture jam the ad by creating their own counter-advertisement (see Figure 7). This process involved many critical skills to unpack the manipulative aspects of the advertisement, dissect the systemic problems of the message, and then create a new message that exposed the deception and injustice of the original media text. During the final exit interviews with all the students, many mentioned that this was one of their favorite activities from the class because it was designed and taught by their peers.

This Ad Busting lesson that was created by undergraduate students teaching their peers was then adopted and used in the CML classes in the teacher education program (see Figure 8). The instructor learned from his students and shared their ideas with other students. This is an example of how democratic pedagogy creates opportunities for learning to go both ways, so much more can be gained when students and teachers are open to learning from each other.

Summary and Implications

Through engaging in critical media analysis and production, the students in this report learned to employ systems thinking related to CML about climate change. They acquired a sense of agency for using media analysis and production for their own learning on addressing the climate crisis. For example, students learned to portray images of consumption that demonstrate the limitations of the economic system. This was based on systems thinking analysis of excessive consumption and dependency on fossil fuel for transportation, leading to their reimagining of sustainable alternative systems. This is the goal of a transformative education that empowers students to think critically about the systems, question the media representations, and create their own more socially and environmentally just messages.

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