Envisioning a desired future: using students’ experiences to understand how communities work together to adapt to a changing climate

Purpose This paper aims to examine a pedagogical approach to teaching climate change at the fifth-grade level, centered on storytelling, futures thinking and collective action. The climate change unit is designed with place-based framing to help students envision desired futures and understand how communities can adapt to climate impacts. The integration of science learning with sustainability competencies enables students’ personal experiences to be connected with broader environmental issues. Design/methodology/approach The study is an illustrative case study of the teaching approach under investigation. It is a collaboratively developed, project-based unit implemented in New Orleans, USA. The instructional design uses students’ personal stories of climate-related disasters (e.g. floods, hurricanes, extreme heat) as anchoring phenomena. Across five lessons, students engage in storytelling, scientific sensemaking about climate mechanisms (e.g. sea level rise) and futures thinking by predicting possible, probable and preferred outcomes and by proposing adaptive solutions. Findings Using examples from the classroom, the authors show how the lesson sequence with the storytelling approach supported students in connecting lived experiences to scientific concepts, fostering deeper understanding of climate change and its local impacts. The authors use case study to demonstrate the practical application of the design to illustrate how the approach encouraged systems thinking by having students evaluate individual versus collective action. Students were supported to envision adaptive futures and propose community-based solutions, highlighting the value of integrating personal relevance with science learning. Teachers learned about science of climate change and described their students as unusually engaged. Originality/value This work is distinctive in its integration of storytelling, place-based education and futures thinking within elementary science. It foregrounds students’ lived experiences and storytelling as central to climate learning and emphasizes collective action and community adaptation. These approaches are often underrepresented in K-12 climate curricula, and the need for them is particularly pressing in regions severely impacted by climate change.