OUR STORY WILL BE THE FUTURE: A Learner-centered Approach to Support Digital Multimodal Composing about the Climate Crisis

This chapter details Project Imagine the Future (Project IF) which middle school students composed using multiple modes to create creative digital narratives that addressed climate change. In particular, we integrated a scaffolded learner-centered approach to empower student voices by offering multiple elements of choice (i.e., disciplinary roles, modes of expression, and climate change indicators). While composing, students selected different disciplinary roles (i.e., designer, scientist, and writer) and worked collaboratively in small groups to create multimodal science fiction stories. Students engaged in composing with a variety of digital tools and modes to create multilayered digital narratives, including comics, animations, infographics, videos, and images. In their stories, students were required to propose a creative solution to issues of choices related to climate change. This compositional flexibility was embedded to encourage, engage, and empower student voices and support the free expression of perspectives toward addressing the climate crisis and how related issues connect to their current and future lives. In this chapter, we present how students navigated these various choices (e.g., choice of climate crisis such as residential flooding) and how the navigation contributed to their understanding of climate change indicators, impacts made by such changes, and ways of addressing local issues. Moreover, we discuss implementing a learner-centered approach to teaching climate change as well as providing scaffolding strategies for adapting similar projects in a variety of classroom contexts.