Teaching climate change: an educator’s journey
Vandana Singh
On an April morning in 2014, I stood on the shore of the Arctic Ocean and looked out at the two or three miles of sea ice glittering before me in the spring sunshine. My hosts, members of the Inupiaq tribe whose ancestors have lived in the Alaskan Arctic for thousands of years, pointed out the pressure ridges, piled-up plates of ice that result from the water below breaking up the frozen surface. Sea ice is the frozen top surface of sea water – it might be as thin as a few centimetres, or as thick as 20 metres. Arctic sea ice is vanishing very quickly, a result of global climate change. On this remote shore between the sea ice and the flat expanse of snowy tundra behind me, the urgency of global climate change felt viscerally real.
I had travelled from Boston, where I currently live and teach to the far northern town of Utqiagvik, formerly known as Barrow, to study how sea ice loss and climate change was affecting the region. My task was to write a case-study for undergraduate education as part of an initiative of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Horrified by what I was reading and learning about the climate crisis, I had been trying to teach climate change in my general physics college classes for a couple of years, with a conspicuous lack of success. Teaching the basic science, such as the greenhouse effect and the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide, I had been motivated by an ethical concern: if climate change was really as serious as climatologists were warning us, then young people and future generations would have to deal with the worst of its impacts. Therefore, as an educator, I felt it was my duty to inform my students so that they could be prepared for the changes that were coming and perhaps even become changemakers for a better future. My naïve hopes were dashed when most students reacted with apathy, despair, or hopelessness, as well as conceptual confusion. I realized then that I needed to heed the advice I was always giving my students: to learn from failure. Clearly, teaching just the basic science where it intersected with general physics was not enough. So here I was, at the edge of the Arctic Ocean, one of the places considered ground zero for climate change.
The climate crisis is arguably the single greatest threat to the survival of humankind and the biosphere. The scientific consensus that it is real, serious, and caused by ‘human activities’ is overwhelming (99% in one study) and unimpeachable (IPCC Sixth Assessment Report). The threat is exacerbated by the fact that climate change is linked to all other social-environmental problems, including the mass extinction of species, the toxic pollution of land, air and oceans, and the severe imbalance in other biogeochemical cycles, such as the nitrogen cycle. Thus, global climate change is part of a polycrisis, a complex of highly interlinked problems, and its frighteningly rapid worsening is likely to exacerbate other issues as well.
In 2020, researcher Christina Kwauk pointed out in a Brookings Institute report that mainstream education had failed us as a mitigation tool for climate change. Education should provide us with the awareness, critical thinking skills and tools for change that are needed to confront our crises, and therefore should be an invaluable ally of climate mitigation. And yet, for the most part, it has failed to do so. Two of the five roadblocks that Kwauk identifies at the macro level are the lack of radical visions for climate education and the lack of adequate teacher training and support for educators. In this article, I want to focus on why climate change might confound our usual ways of thinking about it, teaching it and acting on it, and how we might come up with the much-needed radical visions. Consider the fact that the United Nations has been meeting for 27 years to try to deal with this problem, and yet, climate change continues to get worse every year. There are complex reasons for this failure to come up with an actionable international agreement, but one of the key causes is the nature of the climate problem itself. Climate change defies conventional modes of thinking, and therefore conventional measures will likely fail. This is just as true of education as it is of international politics.
It was this quest – to understand climate change on its own terms, from the landscapes and peoples that disproportionately suffer its impacts – that had led me to the Arctic. I recognized that because our conventional frameworks had failed us, I needed to put these frameworks aside as much as possible and consider the climate itself as teacher. As I collected the stories of people from regions as far apart as Arctic Alaska and villages in Jharkhand and the Sundarbans, it became clear to me that any effective pedagogy of climate change must embrace the key features of the problem – the lessons, if you will, of the climate.
Let me illustrate this point with two stories I use in my classroom, when I introduce the climate crisis. The first is an account drawn from real experiences, of a group of scientists who, 30 years ago, were walking over sea ice in order to set up camp, as part of a research study of sea ice. Before they could set up camp, the Inupiaq Elder who was their guide stopped them and urged them to return to shore. The weather was perfect and the scientists were puzzled at the Elder’s insistence, but reluctantly they complied. As they walked over the sea ice to the shore, there was a deafening crack, and a large piece of sea ice broke off and sailed into the Arctic waters.
In those days, being marooned on a piece of floating ice, subject to the dangerous currents of the Arctic was a death sentence. Somehow the Elder had intuited that the ice was going to break. But how? The scientists had known only one way to understand the world – yet, the Elder – with no formal education at all – had saved their lives.
The second story I tell is based on a phone conversation I had three years ago with a remarkable woman called Parvati, who lives in a small, impoverished village in Jharkhand – a conversation enabled by a friend who has worked with that community for several years. Twenty-two years ago, that region of Jharkhand had thick, contiguous forests, home to a diverse variety of species, providing sustenance and livelihood to a number of village communities. But deforestation for mining and quarrying was having an impact, the most serious of which was a drop in the water table. Along with higher temperatures and malarial outbreaks, agriculture began to fail. Parvati organized other women in the village and they decided to protect their remaining 200 hectares of forest. By patrolling it, driving off would-be loggers, building mud and stone check dams to conserve water, and digging ponds for animals, they regenerated the forest in two decades. When I spoke with Parvati in 2019, she told me that agriculture had become viable again, many birds and animals, with the exception of the tiger, had returned, local temperatures were more bearable, and the malaria menace had receded.
These stories, among others I have collected from different regions of the world, when put in the right context, help illustrate some key lessons of the climate problem.
First, climate change spans vast scales of time – from Earth’s ancient climatic history over four and a half billion years to the relatively recent rise in carbon dioxide levels since the industrial revolution 150 years ago, to the few weeks duration of the 2022 heat wave in India and Pakistan that was made 30% more likely due to climate change. It also spans enormous spatial scales: it is a global problem, but it manifests locally in distinctly different ways. This spatio-temporal vastness is a key feature.
Second, climate change is inherently transdisciplinary. As we can see, real-life stories like the ones you just read contain the threads of every discipline, from physics, chemistry, biology and environment to history, geography, politics and literature. The impact of climate change in Jharkhand and the North Slope of Alaska is different for biophysical reasons, but also because of the different colonial histories of the regions, their distinct cultures and experiences of marginalization, and their experiences with the wider socioeconomic system. Note that climate change is not explicitly mentioned in the Jharkhand story. But when we consider the context – the fact that Jharkhand is one of the most climate-vulnerable states in India, with increased rainfall variability, dangerous heat waves and greater chances of human-animal conflict – then we can see how the efforts of the women of one village stand out as both brave and poignant. Further, it becomes apparent that climate change is not the only problem confronting the people of the region – the more urgent problem was – and still is — deforestation for quarrying and mining – in other words, the model of development that we have inherited from British colonial rule, exacerbated by the current globalized socio-economic order. Therefore, climate change is one of a complex of problems that includes other serious social-environmental issues, as mentioned previously.
The third lesson: both these stories are about interactions between people and their environment. The Earth’s climate constitutes a complex system, that is, a system of interacting human and biophysical components in which the relationships are powerful, often nonlinear, and can cause changes that might start out small, but can result in system-wide shifts. The melting of sea ice in the Arctic affects ocean currents and atmospheric circulation, which carries the impacts far from the Arctic. Recent research indicates that Western US wildfires and the possible drying out of the Amazon rainforest are connected, through a domino chain of causality, to the decline of Arctic sea ice. These teleconnections are an inherent feature of the complex system that is the climate. Another key feature of the complex climate system is the existence of tipping elements, regional climatic and geographical features of the Earth system that, if pushed toward change in certain directions, can shift the entire Earth system toward a new state.
Fourthly, justice and power are central to the problem of climate change. Neither the Inupiat people of Alaska, nor the villagers in Jharkhand, have contributed significantly to the climate crisis, but they are among the most vulnerable to its impacts. Marginalized sections of society have relatively little power – these include the poor, the Indigenous, women, and the young – and yet they suffer the most from a problem created by the rich and powerful. Their courage and creativity, their ideas and talents are generally ignored, and they don’t get invited to the negotiating table. Developed nations of the West bear the largest historical responsibility for the climate crisis, but even within the US and Western Europe, the top 10% are responsible for far more carbon dioxide emissions than the bottom 50%. Globally, the top 10% are responsible for over 50% of the individual emissions of carbon dioxide. Developing nations, blindly following the same model of development that was imposed on them by colonialism, are fast increasing their carbon emissions, although within them also we see the inescapable mark of inequality. Most emissions are coming from the very rich. We can see the stranglehold of power in the arenas of international negotiations, where the powerful have prevented meaningful and actionable climate policy for decades. We also see it in the co-opting of the climate discourse and the preponderance of false solutions. Thus, climate change and climate action are inherently political, because meaningful solutions will inevitably involve confronting power and inequality.
The table below shows how the ways of thinking in globalized modern industrial societies – inevitably reproduced in education – are at odds with these essential features of the climate crisis.
| Key features of the climate crisis | Broad-brush aspects of modern industrial societies |
| Spans large scales of space and time. | Limited spatial and temporal scales and fragmentation of space and time. |
| Is inherently transdisciplinary and connected with other major social-environmental problems. | Fragmentation of knowledge into disciplines that exist in silos with little interaction; problems are seen as reductive and separate. |
| Is rife with complex interconnections at multiple scales, across space and time, and between and among human societies and the rest of Nature. | Simple linear causality dominates thinking; world seen primarily as mechanistic, simple; little or no recognition that we live within multiple interconnected social-natural complex systems; Nature-Culture divide and anthropocentrism are defaults. |
| Is centrally a problem of justice and power. | Living in hierarchical societies with major power imbalances that encourage a blindness to inequality and considerations of justice. |
This fatal mismatch is the heart of the failure of education to meaningfully tackle climate crisis.
So, what’s an educator to do? From my experiments with implementing a learning methodology that embraces the key features of the problem, a set of four dimensions for an effective pedagogy of climate change have emerged. These are: the scientific-technological (understanding the basic science, evidence, and impacts), the transdisciplinary (understanding the intersection of the climate problem with multiple disciplines and other social-environmental problems, and the centrality of justice and power), the epistemological (recognizing dominant paradigms and the importance of Indigenous ways of knowing), and the psychosocial action dimension (equipping ourselves with the collective and psychological support and creativity needed for meaningful action).
Implementing a pedagogical approach informed by these four dimensions involves, among other things, changing the classroom dynamics, with inspiration from the work of scholars of transformational learning theory, mindset, and natural critical learning environments. It involves looking at scientific literacy more broadly, as in SL Vision III, which goes beyond scientific competency and contextualization. Vision III encourages a values-based, metacognitive, emancipatory and action-oriented pedagogy that integrates the cognitive and affective aspects of learning. These inspirations have enabled me to craft a broad and ever-evolving pedagogical approach, the details of which are freely accessible (see below).
Although the pandemic presents new challenges, this approach has promise. I see a better holistic, cognitive and affective understanding of the climate problem among my students and also a greater desire to take meaningful action against the crisis. I see more evidence of critical thinking about purported climate solutions, an empathetic understanding of injustice and its exacerbation by climate change, and the need to embrace new frameworks, paradigms and visions. It is my hope that my explorations will contribute to and inspire other radical efforts to transform climate education.
References
• Chancel, L. (2022). Global carbon inequality over 1990–2019. Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00955-z
• IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. (2021). Climate Change: The Physical Science Basis. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
• Lynas, M. et al. (2021). Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Environmental Research Letters, Vol. 16, Issue 11. https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966
• Sjöström, J., Eilks, I. (2018). Reconsidering Different Visions of Scientific Literacy and Science Education Based on the Concept of Bildung. In: Dori, Y.J., Mevarech, Z.R., Baker, D.R. (eds) Cognition, Metacognition, and Culture in STEM Education. Innovations in Science Education and Technology, vol 24. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66659-4_4
• Singh, V. (2021). Toward a Transdisciplinary, Justice-Centered Pedagogy of Climate Change, in Curriculum and Learning for Climate Action, edited by R. Iyengar and C. Kwauk, UNESCO_IBE. Free download at https://brill.com/view/title/60973
• Singh, V. (2021). Toward an Effective Pedagogy of Climate Change: Lessons from a Physics Classroom (preprint). https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.00281
The author is a professor of physics and environment at Framingham State University near Boston. For more than a decade, she has been researching a trans-disciplinary approach to teaching and communicating climate change, and is currently writing a book on climate pedagogy, forthcoming from Routledge in 2023. She is also a writer of speculative fiction.
