Hope Or Fear? Children's Responses To Climate Change Fiction

The climate crisis makes the need for a change in our relation to nature more evident than ever. Children’s literature can facilitate such a change, because fiction enables us to imagine alternative worlds, relations, and realities, allowing us to rethink our relation to the earth and increase our willingness to mitigate climate change. However, there is considerable debate in communication sciences and children’s literature studies on the effectiveness of narratives focusing on hope or fear (Oziewicz et al. 2022, Chapman et al, 2017). We report on a study in which young readers (aged 9-12, N = 210, divided over three schools) were exposed to climate change narratives that relied on either hope or fear. The effects of these narratives on the young readers on climate change attitude and narrative engagement are assessed via questionnaires before the reading session, directly after it, and one week later. Data collection has been completed and (preliminary) results will be presented. By combining cognitive literary studies and communication sciences, this study provides insight into the effects of different affective strategies in climate change narratives on children’s attitude towards climate change mitigation. The importance of narrative expectations ("all stories end well") for our willingness to act towards climate change mitigation will be discussed.