Our world faces complex, intertwined, and transdisciplinary challenges–such as sea level rise and loss of biodiversity, and schools have been the designated place where young generations should acquire specific competences to face them. In this paper, I frame these issues as Wicked Problems (WPs) and offer an empirical exploration of how middle-schoolers (11–13 years) encounter them. During three workshops in two Swedish middle schools, pupils encountered environmental WPs via process drama, and to navigate these activities, they enacted competences which have been long advocated for. These were made visible by students’ performance as they revealed and used their knowledge and their ability to problematise and empathise. These instances were then acknowledged by peers and teachers, and these moments of recognition impacted how students utilised said competence and performance. Process drama thus opens spaces where students can practice encountering environmental WPs, as well as make use of and acknowledge their competence and performance; these three dimensions are thus in a relation of mutual affect when in a situated educational setting.

As a society, we face increasingly complex and intertwined environmental issues, such as extreme weather events, droughts, sea level rise, and unprecedented loss of biodiversity. The extent and ramifications of these issues remain largely unknown and clear-cut solutions are out of reach. We thus refer to them as environmental wicked problems (WPs). For decades, schools have been seen as the place where younger generations should learn about WPs and acquire a large variety of tools to face them. Instead, in this paper, we turn to emotions, and our aim is to explore how they come to matter in educational activities on WPs. To do this, we facilitate encounters between students and environmental WPs via process drama, thus opening up a space, a happenstance. There, students are not asked to resolve the environmental WPs, but are allowed to experience them, and thus (re)act and relate to situations, as well as human and non-human objects. Under the framing of Sara Ahmed’s ‘sociality of emotions’, we study these happenstance encounters, the emotions that emerge and we then unpack what these emotions do, their work, both to the activity and to its participants.