There is increasing concern about children’s well-being in the face of climate change. Although climate action programs in schools are designed to empower children to act as changemakers themselves, there is very little knowledge on eco-anxiety and fear, the shadow side of this new childhood responsibility to advocate for future survival.
Through an exploratory process using a futures approach and analyzing academic discourse across disciplines, key insights were generated and braided together to create a framework for arts-based climate change education for children, based on Kinship through the climate action of reciprocity. This research at the intersection of education, Indigenous knowledge and the arts, aims to provide context and leverage points helpful in collaborative research and program design. The goal of this research is to foster the development of climate change education for children that is informed, caring, and based on decolonial ‘thinking, feeling and doing’, as an emergent strategy to help move education toward interconnection with the more-than-human world while mitigating childhood eco-anxiety.

This research indicates the need for further research, using creative and participatory methods, with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and educators, in partnership with children and their teachers.