Climate Fiction for the Classroom through Ecocriticism and Collaborative Digital Text Annotation

Abstract

This study took a humanities approach to climate change education, focusing on climate fiction texts in the literature classroom, namely: Barakat Akinsiku’s “The God of the Sea,” Sigrid Marianne Gayangos’s “Galansiyang,” and Jules Hogan’s “Those They Left Behind” from Everything Change: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, Volume III (2021). This encompassed the Quarter 3, Week 7 literature competency in the DepEd Grade 10 curriculum context. In-depth discussion of the cli-fi texts was made possible through the crafting of a lesson exemplar, writing of discussion questions through an ecocritical lens, and using Collaborative Digital Text Annotation (CDTA) as an evaluative reading tool which engendered student responses to the text and interactions within the CDTA activity. Thematic analysis was used in interpreting the digital text annotations which revealed four different themes: drawing out story elements, connecting the text to the real world, performing evaluative reading, and expressing random reactions under which the students' responses to the cli-fi texts were classified. The researchers recommend using online applications such as Google Docs as digital annotation tools during collaborative classroom reading. Also, literature classroom facilitators should create a concrete reward system to encourage students' enthusiasm during the CDTA activities and to achieve the collaborative aspect of the CDTA. Lastly, other reading strategies for evaluating cli-fi texts must be explored.