Preservice elementary teachers' emotional connections and disconnections to climate change in a science course

Abstract

Abstract Due to emotions' evaluative nature, they provide a lens for understanding personal and urgent engagement with events and experiences. Grounding this work in ethnography and sociolinguistics, I utilized discourse analysis to study the emotions of 30 preservice elementary teachers expressed about climate change in a science course. I describe the emotional connections and disconnections within and across the three aspects of climate change that students engaged with most deeply: the impacts, lack of action, and causes of climate change. These emotional connections and disconnections provide new ways to understand preservice elementary teachers' emotional sense‐making of this scientific issue. Implications for examining features of emotions to make salient emotional sense‐making of climate change are discussed. This emotional engagement differs from other findings in which people typically distance themselves from climate change. In addition, the value of analyzing all emotional expressions (“positive” and “negative”) in science learning settings is explained. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 52: 1296–1324, 2015.