Clara Cohnen is a student at University of Cologne focusing on English for Primary Schools. She works as a research assistant at the English Seminar II and, since March 2024, at MESH. In this capacity, she supports Roman Bartosch and Carolin Schwegler, for instance in the interdisciplinary project Just Futures? An Interdisciplinary Approach to Cultural Climate Models (CCM). Clara’s interests include second language acquisition studies and exploring approaches to foster interest in poetry for young readers. Besides having an interest in the arts, Clara is also a writer herself, occasionally publishing her work online.
For internet users all over the globe, the emergence of social media and online news outlets has resulted in a breadth of outlets for their own work and with it an unsurveyable mass of easily accessible information. For educators, this means that we can no longer supervise or steer when and how children are first confronted with climate change and the devastating impact it has on their futures. We can, however, impact the way they process that knowledge by giving them the necessary tools and discussing these issues in a healthy way. To that end, Clara’s personal motivation for joining MESH is to support the research and development of communicative strategies pertaining to climate change, especially those aimed towards individuals who are just now learning about it.
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