Unfolding narrativity: towards a balance between narrative and paradigmatic thinking for climate change education

Climate Change demands that science education evolves beyond the transmission of concepts to foster deeper forms of reasoning, imagination, and ethical engagement. Yet, within Climate Change Education (CCE), a persistent tension remains between the data-driven analytical precision of scientific reasoning and the interpretative, meaning-making ways through which learners relate knowledge to experience. This thesis addresses this tension by exploring how narrative, conceived not as a communication device but as a form of reasoning, can expand the scope of traditional science education. Building on Bruner’s distinction between narrative and logico-scientific mode of thinking, the research develops the Narrativity Pyramid, a theoretical-operative construct that employs the notion of narrativity as a graded feature to identify layers/clusters of narrative elements that touch key educational dimensions of CCE. Each layer represents a site where the two ways of reasoning can confront and contaminate each other in productive ways, the pyramid thus functions both as an analytical lens and as a design scaffold through which the dialogue between abstraction and experience can become visible and implementable. The study adopted a Design-Based Research (DBR)-inspired methodology in three phases. The first phase established the theoretical grounds of the first Narrativity Pyramid. The second phase focused on how to translate this model into educational design, through the FyouTURES activity. The third phase—the school-based course— tested narrativity as an explicit scaffold for CCE. The two interventions also offered crucial insights for the refinement of the narrativity model itself. The findings reveal that narrative and paradigmatic are entangled dimensions of cognition whose interplay can foster sensemaking and agency. Specifically, this research contributes (i) a theoretical model conceptualising narrativity as a bridge between the two ways of thinking, (ii) design principles for learning environments that render such bridge operative, and (iii) empirical evidence of the educational impact on students.