Planting Seeds of Imagination in the EFL Classroom, or the Challenges of Greening the Canon and the Curriculum

While voices in language pedagogy agree on the potential of literary fiction to help children and young adults grapple with complex and global issues such as climate change, too little is being said about the tools and knowledge that teachers need to decide which books to read in class and to what end. Like anyone interested in teaching climate change-related works of fiction, EFL teachers are confronted with the challenging task to choose from a vast array of narrative texts dealing either explicitly or implicitly with the diverse symptoms and effects of the current environmental crisis. In this paper, I discuss insights from canon formation in children’s literature and bring them into conversation with an ongoing research project at the Department of English II at the University of Cologne that aims at developing a toolkit for the selection and teaching of climate fiction in primary and secondary education. Using the example of the novel Boy in the Tower (2014) by Polly Ho-Yen, this paper presents results of the Climate Fiction Lab’s work and offers ideas on how to promote ‘climate change literacy’ (Hoydis, Bartosch and Gurr 2023) in the context of a sustainability-oriented EFL classroom for learners aged 14 to 16.