EDU CLIMA webinar #7: Wonders and Wanders – Ecocritical Dialogues with Picturebooks

The seventh webinar of the EDU-CLIMA webinar series on climate change and sustainability, titled “Wonders and Wanders: Ecocritical Dialogues with Picturebooks”, will be delivered by Marnie Campagnaro (University of Padua), and it will take place on 25 June 2026 at 16:30 CEST.

The team of the bottom-up initiative EDU CLIMA has organised a series of webinars about climate change and sustainability with speakers from the six Arqus universities participating in the project (University of Granada, University of Graz, University of Minho, University Wrocław, and Leipzig University), along with a guest speaker from the University of Minnesota.

About the webinar #7

This interactive talk, led by Dr. Marnie Campagnaro, explores the transformative potential of ecocritical dialogues in children’s literature for fostering climate literacy—the session will focus on ecocriticism and its growing relevance in educational contexts. Participants will engage by sharing their personal connections to nature and exploring “Nature in Culture Matrix,” a dynamic tool designed to facilitate ecocritical discussions around picture books.

Participants will collaboratively take a deep dive into the analyses of picture books, positioning them within their own matrices. The webinar will serve as a hub to reveal convergences and divergences among analytical metrics. It will finally reflect on how ecocritical dialogues with picturebooks can empower young readers and educators to engage meaningfully with climate education.

The webinar will be structured in these main phases:

• A brief introduction to ecocritical dialogues and their relevance for climate literacy and children’s literature;

• A creative self-introduction activity, in which participants will choose one image from a shared online selection and introduce themselves through it;

• A short presentation of The Nature in Culture Matrix as a tool for ecocritical discussion;

• Breakout-room work: each group will read the same four picturebooks and place them on its own matrix;

• Plenary comparison of the four matrices, ideally by overlapping them, in order to identify convergences and divergences in the groups’ choices and discuss the reasons behind them;

• A final reflection on how ecocritical dialogues with picturebooks can support climate education.

About EDU CLIMA

EDU CLIMA is part of the cross-disciplinary education for climate action project, a bottom-up initiative funded by the Arqus Innovation Fund, that unites six Arqus universities, coordinated by the University of Graz.

All sessions will be available afterwards on the Arqus YouTube channel.