Taking Climate Action: A Student Perspective on a Community-Engaged Learning Experience

This study investigates a community-engaged learning experience designed to foster young people’s engagement in addressing climate change. Three university students produced individual and collective narratives to critically interpret their experiences, learning outcomes, and the learning process within a summer school. Their reflections highlight the centrality of key principles of community-engaged learning, including its collective dimension, the assumption of an active role, and the importance of engagement with the community. At the same time, they reveal divergent interpretations emerging from a critical reading shaped by the participants’ personal and disciplinary positionalities. The findings show that involving students in critical reflection and knowledge production makes it possible to foreground situated perspectives that would be unlikely to emerge through more conventional research approaches. Furthermore, the findings suggest that fostering students’ agency in responding to the climate crisis requires educational practices that attend to what students bring into the learning process ‒ their experiences, questions, and emotions ‒ and that are embedded within a relational and institutional ecosystem capable of sustaining learning and civic engagement over time, extending beyond the boundaries of the classroom.

Keywords: community-engaged learning, youth agency, climate change, youth participation, civic engagement, participatory parity

Cinzia Albanesi, Alessia De Rosa Grasso, Riccardo Lughi, Andrea Zina, Christian Compare, Agire per il clima: un’esperienza di community-engaged learning dalla prospettiva studentesca in "PSICOLOGIA DI COMUNITA'" 1/2026, pp 35-55, DOI: 10.3280/psc2026oa23863