Climate Webinars and Teacher Education Lesson Plans
The STEM Teaching Tools team at UW Seattle runs the Climate Teacher Education Collaborative, a network building resources and capacity to teach about community climate justice projects and civic response to the climate crisis in teacher education programs. The initiative is hosting webinars and events; engaging small collaborative teams in developing open education resources (OER) for use in teacher education; and developing educative case studies of community climate responses.
Webinars
Sept. 2022: Using Theatrical Performance to Promote Climate Justice
The September 2022 Climate Teacher Ed Webinar featured Nick Slie, the Co-Artistic Director of Mondo Bizarro and a New Orleans born performer, producer, and cultural organizer. Nick share work from multiple projects that take an intersectional arts-science approach to highlight issues of climate justice in the Mississippi Delta region of the U.S. He draws in examples from science- and arts-based water literacy instruction that is foundationally centered in climate justice, including the Invisible Rivers and the Cry You One projects.
Aug. 2022: Community Climate Justice Education
In the August 2022 Climate Teacher Ed webinar, Jason Foster and Ayesha T. Qazi-Lampert discuss the power of teaching about the environment and climate using community-centered, racial justice pedagogy. Drawing from their experiences working in the Chicago Public School System, Jason and Ayesha share resources that connect teachers with environmental current events happening in their own neighborhoods, and they encourage educators to forge connections with each other and with community members. They highlight the importance of decolonizing biases, learning the history of environmental justice, communicating about justice issues broadly, and developing a critical lens that is interconnected, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational.
In the July 2022 Climate Teacher Ed webinar, David Segura, Danny Morales-Doyle, Karen Salas, Amy Levingston and Susan Nelson describe how a long-term community-school partnership has been able to focus curriculum and social action on environmental justice issues. They share the history of the partnership, the frameworks for justice-focused science education they use, multiple justice-centered curricular examples tied to youth-community action, and guidance on how to take up this inspiring work. There is so much to learn from this work!
June 2022: (W)holistic Science Pedagogy and Climate Justice
In the June 2022 Climate Teacher Ed Webinar, Dr. Alexis Patterson Williams and Dr. Salina Gray discuss their (W)holistic Science Pedagogy framework and share two climate justice curriculum examples. Their approach centers intentional self-work and emotional reflection by educators, engages students in a broad image of science and supports them in taking justice-centered action on climate. They describe the power of focusing instruction on the UN Sustainable Development Goals and share a broad range of supporting resources.
May 2022: Teaching for Climate Justice and Student Action
The May 2022 Climate Teacher Ed Webinar featured Tim Swinehart, a Geography and Environmental Justice teacher at Lincoln High School and a teacher candidate instructor at the Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education, in Portland, Oregon. In this webinar, Tim highlights multidisciplinary ways of engaging high school youth in different forms of climate justice efforts – from public literary performances to crafting educational policy to direct political action. He describes how educators can take up a justice-centered climate approach in their teaching and inspire students to get involved in community action and activism. Tim shares details about his deep expertise with environmental activism in the classroom and shares resources for engaging youth in different kinds of action on climate justice.
April 2022: It's Not Only About the Content
This webinar from April 2022 features Lindsey Kirkland, senior climate change education manager for Climate Generation. In her work, Lindsey designs justice-centered climate change education programs for the public and professional development for K-12 educators. In this webinar, she describes the organization’s more recent work to build deep, justice-centered regional networks for teacher learning. She also discusses the power of storytelling to build understanding, empathy and relationships, telling stories from her own journey toward anti-racism in climate justice work.
March 2022: Leveraging Environmental Justice to Unlock the Potential of Education
The March 2022 Climate Teacher Ed Webinar features Drs. Kelley Lê and Juan Manuel Rubio (both from University of California Irvine), who share their educational efforts connecting environmental justice, history, science, and civic action. They trace how a local community has been investigating and taking action in response to a history of soil pollution—and how educators can bring that kind of socio-scientific topic into secondary science instruction. They discuss how science and science education need to be reframed in order to focus on working towards justice.
Feb. 2022: Pedagogical Commitments for Climate Justice Education
This video features the work of Dr. Fikile Nxumalo (University of Toronto) and Pablo Montes PhC (University of Texas at Austin), who focus on place-based, environmental justice-focused approaches to early childhood education working from Indigenous knowledges and Black feminist geographies. Dr. Nxumalo and Mr. Montes described educational examples from their efforts and offer guidance for educators and teacher educators based on their article “Pedagogical Commitments for Climate Justice Education” (published recently in the NSTA Connected Science Learning journal) which focuses on anti-coloniality, radical relationality, and reciprocity.
Climate Justice Lesson Plans for Preservice Teacher Educators
Centering Environmental and Climate Justice in Education
By Deb L. Morrison & Philip Bell
In this lesson, preservice teachers will develop an understanding of climate justice as multifaceted, learn strategies for identifying and engaging learners with justice-centered phenomena, and explore case studies of environmental and climate justice phenomena.
Leveraging Environmental Justice to Unlock the Potential of Education
By Jeanne Norris, Kelley Lê, Juan Manuel Rubio, Deb L. Morrison & Philip Bell
In this lesson, preservice teachers learn to define key aspects of environmental justice, describe rationales and strategies for engaging students in environmental justice learning activities, explore with learners the socio-historic contexts that influence different traditions of scientific activity and knowledge production, and use environmental justice-centered curricula resources to focus instruction on societally relevant science.
It's Not Only About the Content: People, Culture, and Processes within Climate Justice Education
By Jeanne Norris, Lindsey Kirkland, Kristen Poppleton, & Deb L. Morrison
This lesson supports preservice teachers to describe their personal stories around climate justice and reflect on how these experiences shape their work. Then, the tool helps them define and develop a network of local and national climate justice partners to engage in climate justice learning with youth.
Teaching for Climate Justice and Student Action
By Jeanne Norris, Tim Swinehart, Deb L. Morrison, & Philip Bell
This tool for preservice educators helps them focus on student climate action, learning about instructional approaches and how to navigate systems to make space for this type of learning.
(W)holistic Science Pedagogy &
Climate Justice
By Dr. Alexis Patterson Williams, Dr. Salina Gray, Taiji Nelson & Philip Bell
This PD session helps preservice educators apply the (W)holistic Science Pedagogy framework to their own teaching, with a focus on climate justice learning for social action, liberation, and healing.
Using Theatrical Performance to Promote Climate Justice
By Jeanne Norris, Nick Slie, and Deb L. Morrison
This PD session helps preservice educators explore ways to add the arts and center place-connections into their own work in climate justice learning.
