How Big is My Carbon Footprint? Understanding Young People's Engagement with Climate Change Education

This paper presents a new engagement model for climate change education (CCE) as a result of analysing interactive digital narratives (IDNs) created during the You and CO2 Climate Change Education Programme. Young people aged 13-15 from two schools in Wales participated in three workshops, which culminated in students producing IDNs about climate change using Twine storytelling software. An inductive, grounded-theory approach informed by Bourdieusien principles of habitus and value was used to explore students’ responses to the Programme. Stage 1 coding identified ‘Core Themes’ and located student responses along tri-axial continua showing engagement, agency, and power. Stage 2 coding combined ‘Core Themes’ to build upon Cantell et al.’s 2019 Bicycle Model of Climate Change Education to create a new ‘holistic Agentic Climate-Change Engagement’ model (h-ACE), where learners’ journeys towards full engagement with and understanding of CCE and action could be traced. Barriers to students’ engagement with and understanding of CCE were identified through Bourdieusien analysis of responses. Results show that engagement was related to children’s views on their capacity to effect change on individual, local and governmental level. The h-ACE provides a model for adjusting CCE curricula to accommodate young people’s varying cultures and views

Reading hyperlinks in hypertext fiction: an empirical approach

Hyperlinks are a distinguishing feature of hypertext fictions, a form of digital fiction in which individual units of electronic texts – known as lexias – and/or other material, such as recordings and videos, are organised and connected through hyperlinks (Ensslin and Skains 2017). Numerous typologies have categorised the different types and functions of hyperlinks in digital fiction and various theories explain the cognitive effect of hyperlinks on the reader. However, to date, very little research has taken an empirical approach to hyperlinks in hypertext fiction, with existing empirical studies prioritising the analysis of narrative comprehension over narrative experience. In this chapter, we present results from a reader response study developed as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Reading Digital Fiction’ project (Ref: AH/K004174/1), designed to examine both the different types and the associated cognitive effects of hyperlinks in digital fiction. We offer a new typology of hyperlinks based on previous scholarship and report on our reader-response study using a purpose-built hypertext fiction by Lyle Skains: The Futographer (2016). Synthesising a stylistic analysis of The Futographer with results from our empirical research, this chapter suggests ways in which readers of digital fiction employ specific cognitive strategies to parse hyperlinks within multi-linear hypertext narratives. In particular, our results suggest that readers process the potentially disruptive effect of hyperlinks by reading for the plot