Literary analysis and Narratives from Lived Experiences of Climate Change in Higher Education

In this paper we explore what literary analysis can add to a holistic approach to Climate Change Education (CCE). We take as a case study the existing Master’s course ‘The Lived Experience of Climate Change’. The Short Learning Program of which this course is a part, has successfully proven to combine environmental scientific, economic and social scientific knowledge. Our entrance point for the literary analysis is the concept of Lived Experience, as it revolves around narratives like Climate Fiction does. Analysing the student essays of this course, we propose an integrated narrative approach (reading literature and doing literary analysis), as an example of how narratives (experiental and imaginative) are legitimate knowledge sources in a learning-action cycle. This parallels to what Lived Experience adds to the Learning Program and education on climate change; it is an analytical concept as well as a knowledge product in a narrative form. Both Lived Experience and Climate Fiction stimulate creating situated knowledges on the level of the individual, the collective and of power relations.