“My Home, Our Planet”: Venezuelan Migrant Children in Brazil and the Role of Education of Climate Change

Children and young people are growing up in uncertain and precarious times, as the effects of global climate change permeate their everyday lives and communities. Venezuelan migrant children are among the most exposed to these impacts in South America. While children and young people are being positioned as future leaders whom the public expects to overcome the legacies of environmental inaction, they currently have limited opportunities to cultivate, voice, and express their understandings, concerns, and imaginings about climate change within their schools. This ethnographic study in elementary schools in Boa Vista, Brazil focuses on how children—Venezuelan migrant, Brazilian, and Indigenous Warao—co-construct knowledge about climate change, land, and safety inside classrooms.

The student working in this project would be tasked with conducting literature reviews using the Radcliffe archives and other resources to understand how in the past climate change has impacted migrant children and childhoods, especially in Latin America. My hope is to contextualize the importance of bringing discussions of childhood, migration, and climate change to schools and educators—thus another part of the work will be to review possible curricular material.