Keeping Climate Science Learning and Instruction Focused on Creating Solutions and Building Community Resilience

Authors:

ABBY RUSKEY, DEB MORRISON & PHILIP BELL

Things to Consider

• Students’ climate anxiety and despair can be mitigated by learning about collective and individual climate solutions. By making climate change feel personal, urgent, and close-to-home, students’ values and identities change—and they take informed actions. This happens when teachers spend more instructional time on climate solutions than on decontextualized science. Spend 3/4 of instruction on exploring solutions.
• Providing students with climate-solutions pedagogy and resources not only responds to their social-emotional needs, but also can enhance their academic achievement and life and job preparation. Climate science learning involves engaging in interdisciplinary, field- and project-based, experiential, collaborative learning. This approach results in higher student engagement in core subject area content and higher-order cognitive skill development, such as critical thinking and problem-solving. Solutions-centered action—like in the Multisolving Framework—engages youth in socially just caretaking of their local community.
• Effective practices in climate science education focus on solutions. Instruction should: (1) be personally relevant and engaging, (2) build students’ problem-solving skills and engineering design in the classroom and community, (3) help learners construct their own ideas, and (4) engage students with scientists to collect, analyze & apply data.
  
  

Attending to Equity

• Communities of color are the most vulnerable to extreme weather events such as fires, flooding, and hurricanes. Toxic plants and facilities often reside in these communities, which are increasingly likely to be breached by fire and/or flood.
• Students of color are underrepresented in environmental careers, such as green building or wind and solar research, manufacturing and maintenance.
• Explore global climate change from the perspective of settler-colonialism. Disrupt climate change narratives—including those focused on solutions—that center on white saviorism and romantic narratives of hope.
• In instructional efforts, focus on how non-dominant communities have developed solutions and built resilience in the face of climate change impacts. Focus on the perspectives, values, and goals held by the most impacted communities.
  
  

Recommended Actions You Can Take

• Use climate-solutions-oriented curriculum, assessment tools, and other learning resources. Climate solutions storylines, digital games, carbon footprint calculators and virtual reality simulators are increasing in number, often come with teacher guides, and can be a powerful in-road for student engagement in climate science learning and solutions.
• Consider: the Cool School Challenge, the Climate Game Changer, Learning in Places, and this team-oriented carbon footprint reduction EcoChallenge tool (from NW Earth Institute).
• Provide students with field learning experiences with climate solutions professionals in your community, including Indigenous elders and scientists, local green technology businesspeople, farmers, foresters, water and soil scientists, food sovereignty experts, etc. Project Drawdown’s 100 climate solutions website and initiatives can help you and students think about those you might partner with locally.
• Embed a stewardship, service, or community science project in your curriculum sequence so students engage in hands-on, evidence-based solutions—such as caring for a local garden or ecosystem, engaging in evidence-based political action, conducting an energy audit of business or government sites, participating in tree planting efforts, etc.
  

ALSO SEE STEM TEACHING TOOLS

• #12 Climate Science Ed
• #57 Place-Based Science Ed
• #67 Justice-Centered Phenomena