Picturing Climate Change: How Visual Literacy Shapes Climate Change Literacy

Abstract

Because climate information is often communicated through visual forms, both in the classroom and in the media, visual literacy (VL) plays a central role in how learners make sense of climate concepts and demonstrate climate change literacy (CCL). This dissertation examines how VL supports CCL across educational contexts and how instructional design can strengthen learners’ abilities as both Consumers and Contributors of climate information. In Chapter 2, a systematic review identifies how educational interventions incorporate visual activities to build CCL, yet most emphasize lower-order skills with few opportunities for students to produce visuals or articulate solutions. Chapter 3 introduces the Simple, Serious, Solvable (S3) curricular structure, which is used in subsequent chapters to organize climate content. In Chapter 4, a drawing-to-learn study demonstrates that pre-service and in-service teachers visualize climate change in distinct ways, highlighting opportunities for teacher professional development in both VL and CCL. In Chapter 5, a quantitative VL intervention showed that students with higher VL scores had significantly higher conceptual understanding of climate change and that students intuitively match different image types (e.g., graphs, memes, photos) to different climate topics. Finally, Chapter 6 describes how worldview does not strongly predict conceptual understanding, but that some worldview orientations are associated with higher climate self-efficacy. Collectively, this dissertation advances theory and practice of climate change education by positioning VL as foundational to CCL and by identifying instructional strategies that more effectively prepare learners to understand, communicate, and act on climate change.