Caring pedagogy and climate literacy: teaching English through Han Kang’s fiction in Indonesian higher education

This study explores the potential of climate fiction as a pedagogical tool for fostering climate literacy, ethical reflection, and empathy in Indonesian higher education EFL contexts. Anchored in caring pedagogy – emphasising relationality, empathy, and ethical responsibility – the research examines Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’ and ‘Greek Lessons’ as literary texts that prompt students’ engagement with environmental, moral, and intercultural concerns. Using a qualitative, classroom-based approach, data were gathered through reflective journals, textual interpretation tasks, and structured focus-group discussions to investigate both cognitive and affective dimensions of learning. The findings reveal that interacting with Han Kang’s climate-inflected fiction strengthens linguistic proficiency and critical analysis while also cultivating ecological sensitivity, moral imagination, and a heightened awareness of human – nonhuman interconnectedness. Students’ reflections show that literary engagement deepens their understanding of climate vulnerability, ethical interdependence, and relational care, moving learning beyond traditional language acquisition outcomes. Integrating climate fiction into EFL curricula thus enables educators to create transformative learning spaces where language development is intertwined with sustainability-oriented ethics and ecological consciousness. This approach is particularly relevant in Global South contexts, where environmental crises intersect with educational inequities, highlighting the vital role of literature in nurturing climate literacy, empathetic engagement, and ethical agency among university students.