Paths From Classrooms to Climate Impact Include Taking a Field Trip to the Boiler Room
Too often, when people think of climate education, they envision dry lectures on greenhouse gases or melting ice. What's missed is how student-led inquiry can reveal climate solutions all around
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As I wrote recently, the new climate communication frontier is not explaining global warming or winning the energy-policy information war over fossilized special interests and ideologues.
Those are still important efforts. But the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s 10-year, $369-billion energy package andtrillion-dollar Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has created a very different communication need - filling communication and responsiveness gaps so communities across the country, particularly those most in need, can harvest these abundant resources for energy electrification, conservation and resilient development.
The same holds for education.
Imagine if kids around the United States became the local climate changemakers, learning who decides when aging diesel school buses could be replaced by electric fleets, who makes decisions on school heating upgrades, or wildfire-safe building codes. And imagine if those kids then engaged in the civic work promoting transformation.
This is already happening, but - as with communication - a lot of work is needed to get to scale. For one great example of what’s possible follow the life course of Silas Swanson, a 20-something leader now working on low-carbon energy policy at the Electric Power Research Institute after a journey that began in high school in the Adirondacks - where he helped his town craft a climate plan. He accelerated at Columbia, where he co-ran meetings helping New York City high school students hold their own climate summits. Listen to hime describe his learning and doing journey in my recent Sustain What webcast on “Education for the Anthropocene,” queued up here.
Teach-in time is here again
One excellent resource and community is the annual Worldwide Climate Teach-in. This is an effort led by Bard College and the Open Society University Network that is spreading the capacity for students and teachers to move from understanding to impact, from the ground up, from local to global and back again. The 2023 teach-in launches on March 29.
Here’s the idea from the teach-in website:
A climate teach-in is a bottom up educational event, focused on just solutions to the climate crisis in local communities and globally. This event creates real dialogue. Teach-ins can be anywhere people come together; at colleges, universities, primary, middle and secondary schools, museums, or in faith or civil society communities.
The resources here make it easy to attract audiences beyond those already talking about climate. And our professional development sessions every Wednesday will help you expand your own skills on talking about climate change from multiple subject matter perspectives.
#MakeClimateAClass (University / Grades 8-12)
#ThreeHourTeach-In (University / Grades 8-12)
K-8 Interactive Teach-In
Faith Congregation Teach-In
Climate Comedy & Climate Theater
And PELEASE DO CLICK the links and explore. I’m thrilled you’re here, but I have to tell you there’s a lot of passive ingestion of these posts (like everywhere, I guess), with extraordinarily low click rates (often under 1 percent!). I take the time to aggregate these resources for your benefit. If that’s not what you seek, let me know and I’ll lighten my workload.
From a pre-Substack post - I pretty much live with climate education every waking hour, well beyond the learning and communicating I do here through my writing and in my Sustain What webcasts.
At Columbia's Climate School, my communication initiative is embedded in a pioneering effort to expand a degree-granting program that interlaces disciplines across a big university - from Teachers College through engineering and architecture through basic climate science through the arts and humanities.
My wife, Lisa Mechaley, worked for six years at Children’s Environmental Literacy Foundation, which helps K-12 teachers build sustainability concepts into their existing lesson plans - from Houston to New York and beyond. You can imagine our breakfast and dinner brainstorms! (We also wrote a book together on humanity's weather and climate learning journey.)
So I was excited when Eban Goodstein, a friend running the sustainability center up the Hudson River at Bard College, reached out to describe an ambitious worldwide teach-in on climate solutions and climate justice crosslinked via the hashtag #MakeClimateAClass and the website solveclimateby2030.org. You can also sign a pledge to make climate a class.
Of course no one is going to "solve climate by 2030" given the massive scales of the challenge building a safer human relationship with climate and energy. Goodstein said from the start the intent is to provoke and engage. And the map of participation shows it's working. Explore, engage and share!
Explore the map of climate justice and action teach-ins and related events
I recently hosted a Sustain What conversation on paths to effective and widespread climate education with two pioneers working to build the capacity of teachers and students everywhere to understand and act on climate risks.
They were Jing Lin, a professor of international education at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Oren Pizmony-Levy, a professor of international and comparative education at Columbia's Teachers College and Director of the Center for Sustainable Futures there.
We were joined by a batch of their great students and received amazing input from the audience, including Mujidah Ajibola, an educator building a Climate Literacy and Action Project in Abuja, Nigeria, and Paul Elliott, a teacher educator at Trent University in Ontario and co-chair of the Canada-wide organization Environmental and Sustainability Education in Teacher Education.
Please watch the webcast below on YouTube or watch and share our conversation on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Here's a very rough transcript.
I kicked off the conversation by playing a troubling description of the challenges many teachers in the United States face getting climate change into curricula, offered in 2019 by an elementary school teacher in Zion, Illinois, calling into a climate segment of the the public radio show On Point. Here's the full clip of that remarkable moment, including my reaction:
The Illinois teacher, Sarah, described three facets of the challenge - the focus of school administrators on test scores and standards, the risk of paralyzing elementary school kids with scary information, and the political pressures from all sides:
"This issue is the most stressful issue for me as a teacher because we do not address it hardly at all. It is in the curriculum a bit for science but then we forget about it and move on to other things because school districts are so microscopically focused on test scores, reading, writing. They don’t want to do anything else.
"Plus It’s a little bit of a political issue. In my perspective, very few teachers or administrators see this as such an urgent problem.
"Also in elementary schools it’s just so depressing. We teach them about endangered species that are going to be gone in just a few years."
She described the power of inquiry and what's called "place-based" education, but then bemoaned, again, how the focus on performance impedes such efforts:
"And at the same time there’s such a great opportunity to get them involved in hands on activities that would get them in touch with the natural world they could go outside and build a garden. They could do little things that could help. But no districts that I know are interested in doing any of that because they don’t think it’s helpful for raising their test scores."
The tragedy here - and glaring opportunity - is that you can have it all - engaging kids (and their teachers) in inquiry within a school's walls that leads to learning activities that can hit all the markers school systems are focused on.
A favorite project of mine, requiring no funding or permission slips, is a boiler-room tour. Just take a short trip downstairs to whatever energy system keeps your building warm or cool.
I got to go on one some years back at the remarkable High School for Energy and Technology. This public school in the Bronx was created in place of the failed Grace Dodge High School, which trained students to make eyeglasses, style hair or work as nursing assistants. Now students are educated in ways that boost their employability in the building heating and cooling trades that are a vital part of the transition to more efficient and clean energy. There's an amazing back story behind how this school was created, involving the enterprising sustainability director for New York City's Department of Education at the time, Ozgem Ornektekin.
Jigar Shah, a renewable energy investor who now runs loan programs at the Department of Energy, recently told me he estimates that 100,000 people have to be trained each year to hit targets for spreading efficient building energy systems like heat pumps.
This school is a great link in that chain.
Here's a glimpse at one tour:
In my 2016 sit-down interview with Bill Gates, I encouraged him to visit the Bronx school and take the boiler-room tour so we might figure out ways to propagate the model. Last year, I reiterated that call in my conversation on climate education and girls with Malala for her Bulletin column.
I still want to find ways to spread this model. Please help share this post.
An energy expedition to whatever fuels your school or home or workplace can reveal all sorts of pathways to impact. One of my favorite parts of the Bronx model was seeing the lesson for the day come from the school's custodian-engineer at the time, Otto Lamantia. He was able not only to explain the current system but also note that the school - like many in New York City - was heated with hand-shoveled coal right up until around 2001. Energy transitions do take time, but they do happen.
Here's video of my 2014 interview with custodian-engineer Lamantia:
Your turn
Please point me to school programs or activities that you see breaking some of the impasses around climate learning and doing.
I'm priming the pump below but really need your help.
Ramesh Laungani, an educator and climate communicator who is head of science at Poly Prep, an independent nursery-through-12th-grade school in Brooklyn, tweeted: “I am going to have my students calculate carbon storage in the trees in the neighborhood and on campus to make a recommendation for what type of trees should be planted next!”
From Colombia, an educator, Óscar, tweeted this: "Today in our School six graders were working on the design of a prototype app that included some ideas to support organizations that work against global warming."
Resources and reading
Learn How to Join and Expand the Worldwide Climate/Justice Teach-in - My conversation last fall with Eban Goodstein and some other participants in the teach-in project
The Wild Center - climate education digital resources - The Wild Center is an education and educators' hub based in the Adirondacks that also helps students organize and run climate summits
Children’s Environmental Literacy Foundation - The organization’s Whole School Transformation program helps propel systemic integration of sustainability throughout curriculum, school culture, campus and community.
Institute for Humane Education - Helps educators teach about human rights, environmental preservation, and animal protection to create a world where all can thrive.
Climate Education is Failing our Youth - a State of the Planet post by Annika Larson, a student in the MA in Climate and Society program at the Columbia Climate School
Columbia Climate School education programs - Summer Climate School in the Green Mountains and Climate Corps