TakingITGlobal

only 2 million people here and we don't see climate change as a major problem. I get perspectives from other students… it is completely different when you have a person standing in front of you and he's like, ya we have smog right now, and we weren't able to go to school because of the climate. It's more personal and more real and it's way better! ( P T U J , I N T E R V I E W ) As this team member often expressed, her community in Ptuj is apathetic because they are geographically distant from climate impacts and the industries responsible. Youth engagement often varies based on proximity to climate impacts, with those sheltered by affluence, such as those in the United States (Norgaard 2011) and the United Kingdom (Hibberd and Nguyen 2013) more likely to feel apathetic or removed, compared to youth in more climate-exposed regions like the coast of India (Garg and Lal 2013), the Philippines (Berse 2017), and Inuit youth in northern Canada (MacDonald et al. 2013). Importantly, the team member from Ptuj felt that this apathy can be overcome with social learning, through personal relationships with people more directly impacted. Team members brought their unique cultural and physical geographies into relation with each other, and in the process, climate change evolved for them—from an amorphous global phenomenon into a collection of lived experiences, both international in scope and local in origin, made tangible and relevant. 2 . 3.1 Rela tionships: Deepening You th Under s t anding o f Clima te Change The best part of this project is the team and the people you meet. As [our facilitator] said the first day, "the next 11 days you will be part of a community and a family"… if I stop to think, we met each other like 5 or 6 days ago, and it feels like it's been a year… so they are family. ( S Ã O P A U L O , I N T E R V I E W ) To understand the impact this project had on the youth who participated, we must begin with the relationships they formed with each other at the Bennett Centre in Edmonton. The majority of team members spent 10 days together, the bulk of which was spent talking, writing, and thinking about climate change. Students typically spent two or three, three-hour periods writing together per day, facilitated by an educator from The Centre for Global Education, and were mentored on occasion by the university students who contributed to this report. The facilitator's role was to guide students through a deliberative process, asking questions, and ensuring that each student meaningfully contributed to the White Paper. The perspectives and experiences expressed by youth in previous sections were not just shared with teachers and mentors; team members taught each other, and it was through this social learning that their understanding of climate change evolved. In Ptuj, we don't see climate change as they do in New Delhi or São Paulo, because we are a very small country, we have | 53 Y O U T H A N D C L I M A T E C H A N G E 2 0 1 8 E D I T I O N

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