“Stories Are Our Survival Guides”: Ecojustice Literacies in Politically and Ecologically Vulnerable Places

As a global emergency, climate change impacts all areas of life on the planet including the embodied experiences of teachers, students, and communities. Recognizing that “addressing climate change demands the involvement” of English Language Arts and Literacy (ELA-L) teachers (National Council of Teachers of English, Citation2019), research remains to be done on how ELA-L teachers use language and communication themselves around climate and socioecological crisis. In this article, we share learning from a collaborative study with educators who took part in a two-day retreat focusing on ecojustice orientations to education in Florida, United States. We use ecolinguistic analysis to understand and amplify the stories of teachers seeking to explore and teach for ecojustice literacies, examining how our collaborators’ ecojustice literacies inquiries (in the form of place-based walking and multimodal composing): (1) story their relationship to the human and more-than-human world; (2) construct/orient to stories-we-live-by that are important to their lives and work; and (3) offer their own stories-to-live-by. Focusing on one collaborator, Morgan, we consider her orientation to ecojustice literacies inquiries, as well as how she connected these activities to her teaching context and to teaching and learning as bodies-in-place. Our analysis revealed possibilities not only for creating space for teachers to “try out” ecojustice literacies but also for confronting political attacks facing teachers in their school systems as intertwined with ecojustice. This article contributes to the literacy scholarship by addressing the complex stories of ELA-L teachers working/living in politically and ecologically vulnerable places.