As youth climate activism grows around the world, this project will generate unique understandings into how families composed of first and second generation immigrants from the Global South (GS) are responding to lived experiences of climate crisis in two ethnically diverse cities: Manchester and Melbourne. As well as growing up at a historic crossroads in terms of political and societal responses to the climate crisis, second generation immigrants are at an additional crossroads in their family life, between sets of political and cultural values, economic possibilities and environmental characteristics that have roots in (at least) two countries. This pioneering project will be the first of its kind to conduct research with this often overlooked group of young people, generating insights from two cities, with young people from a range of ethnic backgrounds. The question at the heart of the project is how second generation immigrants - part of the most 'climate change-aware' generation alive today - discuss and negotiate responses to the climate crisis with parents who may have first-hand experience of living with resource and climate uncertainty, yet whose knowledge is often not valued in Global North (GN) contexts. This area of research is both timely and important because at a time when deep-rooted adaptations are urgently needed in societies already feeling the effects of climate change, GS immigrants hold valuable knowledges that are often not known to or fully appreciated by the public and by policy makers in the GN contexts where they are living. Existing research with adult immigrants in the GN has found that immigrants show a higher disposition towards 'sustainable' practices such as reducing household waste, using water sparingly, and walking or cycling over driving. As cities seek to meet ambitious sustainability agendas and as city residents increasingly feel the effects of climate change, the knowledge and experience of GS immigrants can offer insights into how to respond to drought, extreme weather and other effects of climate change. The role of young people in carrying environmental education messages from schools to homes is well researched and documented (including by the PI). However, an important but largely unexplored area is how second generation immigrants respond to and make parents' knowledge of living with climate uncertainty known in schools, where such knowledge can enrich and diversify existing climate change education. The project will employ an action research methodology that will support young people's participation by training them to carry out research in their homes and work with parents, peers, teachers and researchers. The action research will result in a toolkit documenting resources for diversifying education on climate change (among other outputs). This has the potential to benefit students, teachers, policy-makers and environmental NGOS, and in particular second generation immigrants and their families as the valuable knowledge they hold is recognised, debated and applied in Manchester, Melbourne and beyond. Concurrently, the project will make important academic contributions to the fields of environmental politics, political geography and critical environmental education through publications in leading social scientific journals, the PI's first monograph and presentations at international conferences. These academic outputs will position the PI as a leading researcher who is uniquely positioned at the intersection of these fields. The research will furthermore strengthen international networks that the PI and mentors have begun to build through their existing research into environment, sustainability and migration. At a time when knowledge on how to respond to the 'wicked challenge' of climate change in diverse societies is more needed than ever, the research has significant potential to lead to further international collaborations to advance this important and unique area.

In the context of national and international concerns about standards in writing, both in school examinations and in the workplace, there is a pressing need for more informed understanding of the ways in which students become competent, autonomous writers. Many studies have emphasised the importance of metacognition and self-regulation in writing, signalling that writing is not simply about production, but also about choice and control. Metalinguistic understanding (knowledge about language) is one element of this control, yet we know surprisingly little about how this develops or how it supports writing development. Thus, this study seeks to investigate the relationship between metalinguistic understanding and development in writing; in other words, what metalinguistic understanding are students increasingly able to articulate and what are they increasingly able to demonstrate in their writing. In doing so, it brings together two complementary strands of research in writing. Firstly, it sets out to generate understanding of how young writers' metalinguistic understanding develops between the ages of 9 and 14. Existing research on metalinguistic understanding has not considered this in the context of older writers, focusing instead on early years' writing, on oral development, and on bilingual learners. Thus, we have no empirically evidenced understanding of trajectories of metalinguistic development in the middle years. At the same time, we have only limited understanding of the relationship between metalinguistic development and writing development. In general, there is an assumption that metalinguistic development precedes language performance, but in the context of writing, it is important to interrogate whether greater metalinguistic understanding leads to improved writing performance, or whether writing performance marches ahead of, or indeed shapes, metalinguistic development. Gombert (1992) suggests tentatively that declarative knowledge (being able to articulate metalinguistic understanding about writing) precedes procedural knowledge (being able to transfer metalinguistic knowledge into writing). This study will address these gaps in the research through examining the inter-relationship of declarative metalinguistic knowledge and procedural metalinguistic knowledge, and the inter-relationship of metalinguistic understanding and writing performance. Secondly, the study will seek to understand how the explicit teaching of grammar, relevant to the writing being taught, fosters metalinguistic understanding, and whether it supports the generation of metalinguistic understanding which leads to improvement in writing. This will include exploring the role of grammatical metalanguage in enhancing or constraining metalinguistic knowledge. Curricular emphases on teaching grammar are theoretically predicated upon an assumption that explicit teaching leads to increased metalinguistic understanding, which in turn is realized in improved writing performance. This causal trajectory has never been robustly researched, despite the prolonged and heavily contested debate about the place of grammar in the language curriculum (Locke 2010). The proposed study is a collaborative, comparative study involving England and Australia. In England, grammar has notionally been a part of the National Curriculum for English since its inception in 1989, with particular emphasis given to 'grammar for writing' in the National Strategies from 1998-2011. In contrast, Australia is just introducing its first National Curriculum, with a parallel focus on grammar. The bid has been developed jointly and a parallel bid to this submitted to the ARC by the Australian team to fund the Australian element. The proposal here has been designed to have intellectual and methodological coherence both as part of a comparative study or as an independent national project, to mitigate against the risk of the Australian bid being unsuccessful.