What are our responsibilities as educators when teaching and learning about the climate crisis?

 

To begin exploring this question, we encourage you to read Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents by Richard Beach, Jeff Share, and Allen Webb. We also encourage you to check out the methods course resources that Rick Beach has compiled. To see ideas shared by Russ Mayo, Allen Webb, Rich Novak, and Rick Beach at a recent ELATE summer conference, check out their presentation.

We’re also find Jeff Share’s Framework for Critical Media Literacy to be extremely helpful when teaching students to read media reports on the climate crisis.

Have relevant unit or lesson plans to share? We would love to profile your work so that other educators can build on it or adapt it to their teaching contexts.

 

Several teacher candidates and professors from California State University, Long Beach are working on ideas for a Linked Learning English Language Arts/Science unit. The project is called the Critical Literacy and Climate Crisis Curriculum Team, and the goal is that future teachers will be prepared to teach students about the crisis through their disciplines. Through the work in the English Language Arts, secondary-level students can learn to critique and analyze claims made in a wide variety of texts about people’s relationship to the natural world, scientific knowledge, and policies that may mitigate the climate crisis. Through the concurrent work in science, the secondary-level students will engage in empirical work on ocean acidification, allowing them to read and critique texts about the effects of the climate crisis with deeper knowledge about the grounded world that these texts (purport to) represent.

We would like to profile the work of future science teacher Breanna Couffer, who has done powerful lesson planning to teach secondary-level students about ocean acidification.