Ignorance and apathy are not a winning combination when facing down an existential threat. But that’s exactly what Susie Jaramillo, of Encantos Media, found when her team was conducting focus groups with tweens. They were working on their just-released educational video series on climate change, “This Is Cooler.”

“There’s misconceptions around what is actually causing climate change,” she said. “There are so many false narratives: Kids think it’s litter, pollution or a hole in the ozone layer. Zero knowledge in terms of solutions, and zero awareness in terms of the jobs that are available.”

Only two of sixteen 10- to 12-year-olds interviewed could explain the basic facts of climate change; one had done a fifth-grade research project and the other had visited the Climate Museum, a temporary exhibit in New York City.

On top of not knowing the facts, kids this age expressed some pretty dark feelings. Jaramillo said she heard “a lot of lizard brain negativity; doom and gloom. There’s a lot of cynicism, sarcasm — adults dropped the ball. There’s a fatalist mentality — ‘there’s nothing we can do, so oh, well.’”

Meanwhile, teachers report a confidence gap in teaching about climate change. Many say that they feel ill-equipped to tackle it, even as most agree it’s important to teach, and that their students are bringing up the topic and are concerned about it.

One potential ally that could help: educational media. In a 2021 survey of education professionals by the company Kaltura, 94 percent said that video increases student satisfaction and directly contributes to an improvement in student performance.

But a report I co-authored with Sara Poirer in 2022 for This Is Planet Ed, an initiative at the Aspen Institute (where I’m an adviser), found that children’s media is still largely silent on climate. Zero of the most popular family movies of 2021 referred to climate change or related topics, and even when reviewing educational, nature and wildlife-themed TV shows for kids, we found that only nine of 664 episodes, or 1.4 percent, referred to climate change.

Related: Little kids need outdoor play – but not when it’s 110 degrees

To help break the silence, This Is Planet Ed now has a Planet Media initiative, dedicated to encouraging creators to make more scientifically accurate and entertaining media that engages kids on the causes, solutions and even the opportunities to be found in our changing climate.

Planet Media supported the creation of Encantos Media’s just-released “This is Cooler” video series, which is aimed at tweens. It uses a combination of live action and animation, with snappy editing, plenty of humor and positivity, to get across some basic info in terms kids can understand. For example, it compares heat-trapping greenhouse gases to a too-thick blanket making the planet warmer. The series also looks at green career opportunities, like solar panel installer or sustainable fashion designer.

Jaramillo said she was inspired by successful YouTube influencers who inform while they entertain. “It’s super engaging,” she said. “It’s not your typical climate education video.”

Just like the tweens she talked to, many children’s media creators also hold the misconception that climate change equals doom and gloom. I’m currently running an informal survey of people in the children’s media industry for a chapter in an upcoming book on climate change education. More than four out of five of our respondents agreed that “children’s media should cover climate change, its causes, impacts and solutions, in developmentally appropriate ways.”

But when asked why there isn’t more coverage of the topic to be found already, the top three responses were “creators don’t have the background knowledge,” “too scary” and “too controversial.” One respondent, who works in climate change education, said, “My children (ages 6 and 8) no longer want to watch nature documentaries because they always manage to describe how climate change threatens or is killing wildlife and their ecosystems. It’s too scary and they feel helpless.”

Related: How student school board members are driving climate action

One of the most successful kids’ science media creators out there says that doesn’t have to be the case. “It’s important to meet kids where they are. To care about the planet you first have to love it,” said Mindy Thomas, co-host of “Wow in the World” from Tinkercast. The kids’ science podcast reaches about 600,000 unique listeners a month. And at least one in five episodes touches on the environment.

Thomas and her team participated in Planet Media’s recent “pitch fest,” an open call for more content that puts across the core facts of climate change in an age-appropriate way, as well as depicting solutions. “We wanted to use our platform to help elevate this important initiative,” said Meredith Halpern-Ranzer, co-founder of Tinkercast. “Climate activism is always something we’ve been really passionate about.”

Often, Halpern-Ranzer and her team find their “wow” by focusing on emerging climate solutions, like a plant-based substitute for single-use plastic, or white paint that can cool down a city. Last fall, they launched Tinker Class, a National Science Foundation-funded hub for teachers to use the podcasts in their elementary school classrooms, as the instigators for “podject-based learning” activities (the “Wow in the World” team really likes puns). About 2,000 teachers have participated so far. Similarly, This is Planet Ed has created an “educational guide” to reinforce the key messages that Planet Media content is trying to get across.

Ashlye Allison teaches fifth grade in a Title I elementary school in South Seattle. She crafts her own curriculum on climate change, following the Next Generation Science Standards, which seek to improve science education using a three-dimensional approach.

“I want it to be connected to their daily lives and what’s going on in Seattle, and about, ‘what can we do about this?’” She showed the “This Is Cooler” video to her students, and said they found it more engaging than other videos she’s used in class.

Just as Jaramillo found, Allison said her students especially liked the video’s reference to solutions like solar power and electric school buses. “If it’s just doom and gloom, nothing can happen, and so I don’t care. That’s what my kids took out of it: solutions. That’s what they quoted the most, is how to fix it. And I think they would be interested in more ways people are fixing different problems.”

This column about climate change outreach was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Yancy Sanes teaches a unit on the climate crisis at Fannie Lou Hamer High School in the Bronx – not climate change, but the climatecrisis. He is unequivocal that he wants his high school students to be climate activists.

“I teach from a mindset and lens that I want to make sure my students are becoming activists, and it’s not enough just talking about it,” the science and math teacher said. “I need to take my students outside and have them actually do the work of protesting.”

The school partners with local environmental justice organizations to advocate for a greener Bronx. Sanes recently took some students to a rally that called for shutting down the jail on Rikers Island and replacing it with a solar energy farm, wastewater treatment plant and battery storage facility.

Sanes gets a lot of support for this approach from his administration. Social justice is a core value of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, and the school also belongs to a special assessment consortium, giving it more freedom in what is taught than a typical New York City public high school.

For Sanes, who grew up in the neighborhood and graduated from Fannie Lou Hamer himself, getting his students involved in activism is a key way to give them agency and protect their mental health as they learn what’s happening to the planet. “This is a topic that is very depressing. I don’t want to just end this unit with ‘things are really bad,’ but ‘what can we do, how are we fighting back’.” Indeed, climate anxiety is widespread among young people, and collective action has been identified as one way to ameliorate it.

Related: Teaching ‘action civics’ engages kids – and ignites controversy

Sanes is at the far end of the teaching spectrum when it comes to promoting climate activism, not to mention discussing controversial issues of any kind in his classroom. Conservative activists have already begun branding even basic instruction about climate change as “left-wing indoctrination.” The think tank Rand recently reported in its 2023 State of the American Teacher survey that two-thirds of teachers nationally said they were limiting discussions about political and social issues in class. The authors of the report observed that there seemed to be a spillover effect from states that have passed new laws restricting topics like race and gender, to states where no such laws are on the books. 

The current level of political polarization is having a chilling effect, making civics education into a third rail, according to Holly Korbey, an education reporter and the author of a 2019 book on civics education, “Building Better Citizens: A New Civics Education for All.” “We are living in this time where there’s increased scrutiny on what schools are telling kids,” she said.

She said that, as a mom living in deep-red Tennessee, she wouldn’t be happy to have a teacher bringing her kids to protests. “I really don’t want schools to tell my kids to be activists. I think about how I personally feel about issues and flip that around.  Would I be okay with teachers doing that? And the answer is no.”

Even Sanes has a line he won’t cross. He taught his students about Greta Thunberg and her school strikes, but he stopped short of encouraging his students to do the same. “I specifically cannot tell students, you gotta walk out of school,” he said. “That goes against my union.”

And yet, there is a broad bipartisan consensus that schools have an obligation to prepare citizens to participate in a democracy. And, emerging best practices in civics education include something called “action civics,” in which teachers in civics and government classes guide kids to take action locally on issues they choose. Nonprofits like Generation Citizen and the Mikva Challenge, Korbey said, cite internal research that these kinds of activist-ish activities improve knowledge, civic skills, and motivation to remain involved in politics or their local community. Others have argued that without a robust understanding of the workings of government, “action civics” provides a “sugar rush” without enough substance.

Related: The climate change lesson plans teachers need and don’t have

Even at the college level, it’s rare for students to study climate activism in particular, or political activism more generally. And this leads to a broader lack of knowledge about how power works in society, say some experts.

“Having visited many, many departments in many schools over the years, I’m shocked at how few places, particularly policy schools, teach social movements,” said sociologist Dana Fisher. Fisher is currently teaching a graduate course called “Global Environmental Politics: Activism and the Environment,” and she also has a new book out about climate activism,“Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action.”She’s taught about social movements for two decades at American University in Washington, D.C., and the University of Maryland-College Park.

“It’s crazy to me that, given that the civil society sector is such a huge part of democracy, there would not be a focus on that,” she added.

Through empirical research, Fisher’s work counters stereotypes and misconceptions about climate activism. For example, she’s found that disruptive forms of protest like blocking a road or throwing soup on a masterpiece are effective even when they’re unpopular. ”It doesn’t draw support for the disruption. It draws support for more moderate parts of the movement,” she said. “And so it helps to expand the base.”

As an illustration of the ignorance about disruptive action and civil disobedience in particular, Fisher noted K-12 students rarely hear about the topic unless studying the 1960s era, and “a very sanitized version. They don’t remember that the Civil Rights Movement was really unpopular and had a very active radical flank that was doing sit-ins and marches.”

In 12 years of public school in Shreveport, Louisiana, for example, Jada Walden learned very little about activism, including environmental activism. She learned a bit in school about the Civil Rights Movement, although most of what she remembers about it are “the things your grandmother teaches you.”

Related: How do we teach Black history in polarized times?

Walden didn’t hear much about climate change either until she got to Southern University and A&M College, in Baton Rouge. “When I got to college, there’s activism everywhere for all types of stuff,” she said.

She’d enrolled with the intention of becoming a veterinarian. “When I first got there. I just wanted to hit my books, get my degree,” she recalled. “But my advisors, they pushed for so much more.” She became passionate about climate justice and the human impact on the environment, and ended up majoring in urban forestry. She was a student member of This Is Planet Ed’s Higher Education Climate Action Task Force (where, full disclosure, I’m an advisor.) 

If it were up to her, Walden would require all college students to study the climate crisis, and do independent research to learn how it will affect them personally. “Make it personal for them. Help them connect. It will make a world of difference.”

Korbey, the “Building Better Citizens” author, would agree with that approach. “Schools exist to give students knowledge, not to create activists,” she said. “The thing we’re doing very poorly is give kids the knowledge they need to become good citizens.”

This column about teaching climate activism was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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“Mom, are there any more Earths?”

Angelique Hammack, a teacher in California, creates lesson plans about climate change for the website SubjectToClimate. She often starts from a question posed by one of her four children.

Her 7-year-old, who has autism, has been really interested in space lately. “He was asking me questions about the solar system and about black holes, and I started pulling out all these books I had on outer space,” she said. “He’s got a telescope for his birthday, he’s been looking at the moon.”

When he asked the question about whether there were more Earths, Hammack saw the opening to create a climate-related lesson that explains how Earth is a “Goldilocks planet,” with just-right conditions for life to thrive.

New York state is currently considering several climate education bills. If the proposed policies become law, the state will join California and New Jersey in mandating that climate topics be introduced across grade levels and subjects, not just confined to science class. A wide range of science and environmental groups such as the National Wildlife Federation and Earthday.org back this interdisciplinary approach to climate education.

But as the movement for teaching climate grows, thanks to new standards and increasing student curiosity, teachers are on the hunt for materials and lessons they can rely on. “I think there’s a big disconnect,” said Lauren Madden, professor of elementary science education at The College of New Jersey. “Teachers really need materials that they can use tomorrow.”

For the last few years, Madden has been researching the experiences of teachers who are tackling this topic. She shared some of her results with The Hechinger Report. SubjectToClimate, a large free repository of climate change lessons, also shared some data on its most popular lessons and materials.

Madden said that what teachers need most are clear strategies that allow them to plug climate lessons into existing curricula, so that climate can be interwoven with existing requirements, rather than wedged into an already-packed schedule. “Teachers want and need straightforward starting points in terms of instructional materials,” she said.

Yen-Yen Chiu, director of content creation for SubjectToClimate, agreed. In response to demand, she said, the organization is beginning to create teacher pacing guides, like a middle school math pacing guide that maps specific climate resources from their database to math standards.

Here’s an overview of more key findings from Madden, and from Hammack and Chiu at SubjectToClimate.

• Younger learners have big questions: At SubjectToClimate, the most-searched lessons are for grades K-5; and there is unmet demand for grades 3-5. Hammack said it can be tough to find materials that are simple enough for the youngest students. “I created a unit on energy — I intended it for K-2 but we ended up changing it to 3-4,” she said. “Energy is so abstract for a K-2nd audience.” 
• Energy, extreme weather and humanities: Energy is the most popular topic on SubjectToClimate. There’s also growing interest in lessons related to extreme weather, and lessons that relate to non-science subjects, such as writing and public speaking. One art lesson — on “Energy and Art” is among the top 10 most popular on the site.
• Facts and evidence: Madden finds teachers (especially new ones) want to gain familiarity with facts they might not have learned in a general education curriculum. They also need to be able to clearly and simply attribute scientific findings to specific data: i.e., how we know that atmospheric carbon is rising, or that storms are getting bigger. This presents a bigger challenge, requiring the development of scientific literacy, Madden said: “I think it’s important that we explain what counts as evidence.”
• Debate, but not doubt: In the United States, climate change is still a highly politicized topic. Teachers need help to present debates in an evolving field of research without losing sight of the overwhelming scientific consensus. This also includes lessons that directly combat misinformation or disinformation that students might bring in from outside the classroom. “Teachers want to know where scientific debate is appropriate. For example, wind vs. solar is a topic that can yield productive discussion, while whether climate change is exacerbated by human activity is not,” said Madden. The New York Times recently reported that a Republican state representative wants to amend standards in Connecticut in a way that would obscure that consensus in the name of open debate.  
• Climate brings up feelings: While a lot of introduction of climate topics is happening in response to new state standards, Madden said students are also bringing up the topic, for example, in response to extreme or unseasonable weather. And that’s making some teachers nervous. “Teachers worry that they are not knowledgeable enough about the science of climate change to answer students’ questions appropriately,” she said. “There is also concern about inciting dread and anxiety in children, especially at the lower grade levels.” Hammack said that she finds herself wondering how deep to go: “Some of the videos I’ve been watching are scaring me and I’m 44!” And Madden said those climate emotions are, if anything, stronger among kids in higher grades. “In my experience, it’s preteens and teenagers who have that sense of understanding the scope of these problems,” she said. “They are very concerned.”
• English Language Learners: There’s a gap in resources for these learners. Madden points out that in Spanish, “clima” is the word for both “weather” and “climate,” which can at times cause confusion. SubjectToClimate lists 93 resources suitable for Spanish speakers and/or Spanish classes.
• Focus on solutions: Related to concerns about climate anxiety, is a clear desire for lessons that deal with solutions. Among the SubjectToClimate top 10 most-trafficked lesson plans are two that deal with renewable energy, one about conservation, one about reducing, reusing and recycling, and one about green transportation. Underscoring the demand, This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m an advisor) and The Nature Conservancy are currently collaborating on an initiative to create more short-form content for children focused on hope and solutions.

“I have to say that the message that comes across loud and clear to me has been — telling the truth is really important, and focusing on areas for solutions and optimism,” said Madden. “There are really great things happening at the edges of what humans are capable of right now.”

This column about climate change lessons was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Pleasantville is a mostly Black and Hispanic community located between two major freeways, the I-10 and the 610, in Houston, Texas. This placement is no accident, said Bridgette Murray, a retired nurse and local community leader: “The highway plan in the 1950s was used to divide communities of color.” Today, an estimated 300,000 vehicles stream by on a daily basis, she said. The neighborhood is also close to the Houston Ship Channel, exposing it to heavy industrial pollution.

But state air monitoring stations aren’t placed to capture all the hazards concentrated in that small area. So Murray’s group, ACTS (Achieving Community Tasks Successfully), has been partnering for almost a decade with urban planning expert Robert Bullard at Texas Southern University, to do their own air quality monitoring. ACTS just won a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to expand the program.

Bullard has been called the father of the environmental justice movement. His 1990 book “Dumping in Dixie” documented the systemic placement of polluting facilities and waste disposal in communities of color, as well as those communities fighting back. He said scientists and communities need each other.

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people,” he said. “We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

“It’s a mutual respect,” Murray said of the relationship between her group and the Texas Southern researchers. “You have to have a partner that respects the ideas you are bringing to the table and also allows you to grow.”

Bullard is co-founder, with Beverly Wright, of the HBCU Climate Change Consortium, which brings together historically black universities and community-based organizations in what Wright has termed the “communiversity” model. There are partnerships like the one in Houston all over the South: Dillard and Xavier Universities, in New Orleans, working on wetlands restoration and equitable recovery from storms; Jackson State is working in Gulfport, Mississippi, on legacy pollution; and Florida A&M in Pensacola on the issue of landfills and borrow pits (holes dug to extract sand and clay that are then used as landfill).

Bullard said it’s no accident that so many HBCUs are involved in this work. “Black colleges and universities historically combined the idea of using education for advancement and liberation, with the struggle for civil rights.”

When these partnerships go smoothly, Bullard said, universities provide community-based organizations with access to data and help advocating for themselves; students and scholars get opportunities to do applied research with a clear social mission.

“We need the principle of environmental justice embedded in our climate policies. The overarching principle is that the people who are most impacted must speak for themselves and must be in those rooms and at those tables when decisions are being made about their lives.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

A lot of growth is happening in environmental justice right now. ACTS’ $500,000 EPA grant is part of what the White House touts as “the most ambitious environmental justice agenda ever undertaken by the Federal Government.” Notably, President Biden’s Justice40 initiative decrees that 40 percent of all federal dollars allocated to climate change, clean energy, and related policy goals flow to communities like Pleasantville: marginalized, underserved, and systematically overburdened by pollution.

Expanding on this model, the EPA has allocated $177 million to 16 “Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers” — a mix of nonprofits and universities that will help groups like ACTS get federal grants to achieve their goals.

But, warned Bullard, all the new funding might cause a gold rush, raising the danger of attracting bad actors. Sometimes, he said, universities act like “grant-writing mills,” exploiting communities without sharing the benefits. “You parachute in, you mine the data, you leave and the community doesn’t know what hit them. That is not authentic partnership.”

Murray, at ACTS, has seen that kind of behavior herself. “A one-sided relationship where they came in to take information,” she recalled. “The paper was written, the accolades [for researchers] happen, and the community is just like it was, with no ability to address anything.”

“Our climate scientists are great at science, but not good translators when it comes to taking that data to people.”

Robert Bullard, demographer, Texas Southern University

It takes sensitivity and hard work to overcome what can be a long history of town-gown tensions between universities and local communities. “You have to earn trust,” said Bullard. “Trust is not given by a memorandum of understanding.” One way to break down barriers is to make sure that all participants — whether they have a GED or a PhD — share the air equitably at meetings between researchers and community leaders. And those meetings might be held in the evenings or on weekends, because community groups are often run by volunteers. 

Denae King, a PhD toxicologist, works with Bullard as an associate director at the Bullard Center. She said she’s always looking for a chance to give space to community partners like ACTS, and reduce or equalize any power dynamic.

“I just ended a meeting where someone was asking me to put together a proposal to showcase environmental justice at a conference,” she said. “Before I would be willing to do that, I want to make sure it’s OK to showcase community leaders in this space. I might split my time in half and we co-present. Or it may look like me helping the community leader to prepare their presentation. I might be in the room and say nothing, but my presence says, I’m here to support you.”

This column about the ‘communiversity’ was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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As part of a new program, every third grader in Albuquerque Public Schools spends a day at the Los Padillas Wildlife Sanctuary just outside the city. There, a wide variety of local landscapes are packed into five acres: a meadow, piñon, juniper and cottonwood trees, an arroyo and even a pond — a rarity in the desert.

“All the way into October they can fish in the pond with a net,” said Monie Corona, an environmental education resource teacher for the district. “There’s cattails, dragonflies. For the kids to feel like they’re playing, but they’re actually learning — that to me is the key thing.”

The sanctuary borders the black mesas to the west and to the east and the Rio Grande bosque — a term for a forest near a river bank. To the south is the Pueblo of Isleta, one of New Mexico’s many Native American communities: There are 19 different sovereign Pueblos, plus Apache and Navajo communities, across the state.

Research on the physical, psychological and academic benefits of outdoor learning for kids is well-established, and is now informing the development of climate education. What’s also becoming well-known is the essential role of traditional and Indigenous ecological knowledge in the effort to cope with the climate crisis. Authorities as disparate as UNESCO and the U.S. Forest Service, have underlined the value, not only of specific place-based and historical knowledge of flora and fauna, but of traditional ways of relating to and understanding humans’ place in the natural world as we seek to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

And, as recently noted in a review of the potential impact the education sector can have on U.S. cities’ climate plans by This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor), Albuquerque Public Schools is among those pioneering the attempt to connect outdoor learning with local and Indigenous knowledge.

During Los Padillas field trips, the children spend time with Indigenous educators like Jered Lee, whose ancestral roots are in the Naschitti Region of the Navajo reservation in the northwest corner of the state.

“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important,” he said. “Even though I don’t live in a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, their values can still be applied to my livelihood today.”

Related: For preschoolers after the pandemic, more states say: Learn outdoors

Perhaps surprisingly, Lee doesn’t much care for the term “climate change”; he finds it too political. “We hear that we live in unprecedented times; well, when was it ever precedented? As far as I have understood, as far as our traditional stories, the world has always been changing,”

he said.What he seeks to instill in his brief time with the children is a sense of gratitude for being alive, and connection to other living things.

“They sit on the grass, and I sit on the earth with them, and try to see things from their eyes … I ask them to name their five senses, which they all know, and then I say, ‘Who taught you how to use them?’ And they might say ‘My mom,’ and then they think about it … and it’s almost like they refer to a divine source. They didn’t have to be instructed, and it’s in line with other growth processes in the natural world.”

Lee shares with the children a version of the Navajo creation story, and another one about horses, but he won’t tell them to a reporter on tape: They are part of an oral tradition passed down to him from his elders. He will say that he talks to the children about the rhythms of nature, and humans’ place in the world.

“The movement of nature, the rising of the dawn, the daytime sky, the evening light and the darkness of night, and how that process regenerates itself and the elongation of that process creates the spring, summer, fall, winter, and creates our being, our livelihood … for many it’s like we’re separate from that, we’re above that and we’re more intelligent than that. But the most intelligent people I know adhere to nature and know there isn’t a knowledge that surpasses that. It’s a humbling realization for people but it’s also good.” 

“What they learn in the classroom is very important, yes. But what they learn through their own healthy exploration of their senses, that’s also important. Even though I don’t live on a dirt floor hogan like our ancestors, the values associated can still be applied to my livelihood today.”

Jered Lee, a Navajo nation member who participates in Albuquerque Public Schools’ outdoor learning program

Some 80 percent of the students enrolled in Albuquerque Public Schools are people of color. Around 5.3 percent are American Indian, and are served by the district’s Indian Education Department.

Monie Corona works within that department in a newly created position, supporting Los Padillas and other outdoor programming. Her watchwords are “cultural humility, cultural relevance and the cultural landscape.” She said this collaboration, bringing Indigenous learning to all students in an outdoor setting, “has been a long time coming, let’s put it that way. As a [white] teacher coming in 30 years ago, I was not prepared for working with Native American students and their culture. There’s a lot of things we have to understand and be able to respect as well.”

She said her focus and that of her colleagues sharpened in 2018, after a state court’s decision in Yazzie/Martinez v. State of New Mexico found that the state wasn’t doing enough to meet its obligation to help all students become college and career ready, especially low-income students, Native Americans, English language learners and students with disabilities. New Mexico’s high school graduation rate is consistently among the lowest in the nation; Albuquerque’s is even lower, at 69 percent in 2022.

Corona hopes that the Los Padillas program, as well as aligned efforts to bring Indigenous traditions into the school garden program and into outdoor learning opportunities at all grade levels, will enhance student engagement, particularly for those with Native heritage.

“Making sure the kids know their culture — it’s not easy,” she said. “We want to build up their self esteem, their motivation to be at school.”  

Lee said that just about every time he speaks to a class, one or two children will raise their hand and say, “I’m Navajo, too!” or name another tribe. But his aim is to share his culture and language and find commonalities with students, no matter their background. “Here in Albuquerque there’s different cultures. And I’ve realized this about many cultures around the world, the more you talk to them, our language, our customs may be different but the root of our cultural values are very similar.”

This story about outdoor learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Dora Ramos is a family child care provider in Stamford, Connecticut, where the temperature climbed above 90 degrees for a few days in July. She takes care of children in her home, which has a large backyard, and was able to adapt, still getting the children outside, even on the hottest days.

“Our parents bring the children at 7:10 a.m., so we bring them outside very early — first thing,” she said. “We have sprinklers; they use the hose to fill up pots with water and ‘cook.’”

But in Dallas, where the high hit 110 degrees on August 18, it wasn’t safe or possible to play outside for weeks-long stretches this summer, said Cori Berg, the director of Hope Day School, a preschool there. “It was cranky weather for sure,” she said. “What most people don’t really think about is what it’s like for a child in a center. They’re cooped up in one room for hours and hours and hours.”

Much research supports young children’s need for movement, outdoor play and time in nature. Regulations in many places require kids in child care facilities to have access to outdoor play space, weather permitting.

But increasingly, the weather does not permit. And leaders in the world of early childhood development are starting to call attention to the imperative to design and upgrade child care centers — and the cities where they are located — for our climate-altered world, with the needs of the youngest in mind.

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside. And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.”

Jessica Sager, who runs the network All Our Kin

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it,” said Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force, which has just issued its first set of recommendations. (Full disclosure, I’m an advisor to This Is Planet Ed, which convened the task force in collaboration with the think tank Capita.)

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education,” said Garling. But while children under 5 have a developmental need to spend time outside, extreme weather — whether heat, wildfire smoke or other air pollution — is particularly dangerous for this age group. Young children breathe twice as much air per pound of body weight, Garling pointed out.

Related: OPINION: We must help our youngest learners navigate enormous risks from climate change

Ankita Chachra is a designer, architect and new mother working on the issue of climate-resilient cities for children at the think tank Capita. She recently blogged about choices made in cities around the world, from Copenhagen to her native Delhi, that can help preserve outdoor play. These can sometimes be simple adaptations. When it’s very hot, Ramos, for example, takes her children outside first thing in the morning.

“Copenhagen has parks that do flood with extreme rain,” Chachra said, but permeable surfaces, like grass, allow the water to drain away quickly. “Asphalt, rubber, and metal get extremely heated when you don’t have shade to protect those surfaces. Grass, mulch, and wood absorb heat differently. A shaded street or area is 4 degrees Celsius cooler than those that don’t have shade,” she added. And when cities make room for parks over cars, there is more equitable access to safe, cooler outdoor space.

Cori Berg, in Dallas, is grateful for her yard’s “two giant pecan trees — those giant shade structures are really expensive.”

When children just can’t go outside, early child care educators said they have to improvise. Jessica Sager, whose network All Our Kin supports in-home family child care providers in 25 states, did an informal survey at The Hechinger Report’s request to ask providers how they are coping with extreme weather.

“One of the things we have to do is take the climate resources coming through the Inflation Reduction Act, and make sure that we prioritize young children, both in multifamily housing and early care/education.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

“I heard a lot of stories about the wildfires in particular,” she said — the smoke from Canadian fires affected at least 120 million Americans this summer. “Our educators had air purifiers — we had gotten them during Covid. Our coaches had already worked with educators about doing indoor gross motor play — obstacle courses, scavenger hunts. Balls, scarves, parachutes. Putting a mattress on the floor and letting kids jump up and down. A lot of song and dance activities. Or putting colored tape on the floor and pretending it’s a balance beam. ”

On a city-wide level, some have proposed bringing back free or cheap indoor playspaces, such as the McDonald’s ball pit, perhaps repurposing disused shopping malls.*

But despite all this creativity, it’s emotionally difficult for both providers and children when children can’t play outside because of severe weather and other hazards — Berg’s “cranky weather.”

“During the smoke some kids felt very sad that they couldn’t go outside,” said All Our Kin’s Sager. “And the caregivers had to explain to them what was wrong.” There’s a “real parallel to what caregivers had to do during Covid,” to make a scary reality understandable for little kids, she said.

Garling and other policymakers are conscious that they are bringing up climate threats at a time when the early childhood sector already feels besieged.

The United States government spends much less than the average of its peer countries on early child development in a good year, and supplemental funds provided during the pandemic have just fallen off a cliff, leaving the sector even more cash starved. Group child care in private homes is often parents’ most affordable solution: The National Center for Education Statistics says 1 in 5 children under 5 spend time in these settings.

Related: COLUMN: Want teachers to teach about climate change? You’ve got to train them

But these home-based programs pose a major infrastructure challenge. Garling’s organization recently released a new interactive map showing that in New York City, these centers often — 37.2 percent of the time — include basement space. And 1,638 centers, serving 22,000 children, are at risk of flooding in storms such as the one that hit the city with more than 8 inches of rain on September 29.

“At times it feels overwhelming. There’s so many things early care and education professionals have to worry about,” Garling said. But on the other hand, she argued, there are federal funds the sector can and should claim for retrofitting and upgrades now.

“I feel like there are current opportunities through [the Inflation Reduction Act] that are creating more urgency — in a good way,” she said. “This is not something I was talking about two years ago and now it is 80 percent of what I talk about all the time. “

“They have the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis but will bear the brunt of it.”

Angie Garling, vice president for early care and education for the Low Income Investment Fund, and a member of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force

In the meantime, early childhood educators are working hard to instill a love of nature in the children they care for, in all kinds of weather. Berg has been taking her teachers on nature walks, and introduced a curriculum about Texas’s many state parks. 

The Connecticut child care owner, Ramos, who grew up visiting a farm in her native Peru, sees empathy blooming in her toddlers as they encounter the natural world. “One day a one year old was walking and saw a little slug on the ground,” she recounted. “He points — ‘Oh no, oh no!’ He was so sad. The father immediately went down, picked it up and put it on the grass. It made my day.”

*Clarification: This sentence has been updated to clarify the support for indoor play spaces.

This column about outdoor play was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Jesika Gonzalez will tell you that she wasn’t the biggest fan of Porterville, California, while she was growing up. 

“When I was younger, I was very, like, angsty,” the 18-year-old said as she flicked her purple hair over her shoulder. “Whatever, this town’s small, nothing to do.”

Porterville is a predominantly Hispanic working-class town in the Central Valley of California, where environmental hazards include some of the worst air quality in the state; the past year’s torrential rains that inundated hundreds of acres of farmland; and a heat wave that pushed temperatures past 110 degrees Fahrenheit this July. 

But Porterville has this going for it: Its school district pioneered a partnership with Climate Action Pathways for Schools, or CAPS, a nonprofit that aims to help high school students become more environmentally aware while simultaneously lowering their school’s carbon footprint and earning wages.

“The issues we’re trying to address are common, and we’re delivering real benefits: environmentally, in terms of student outcomes, in terms of cost savings.”

Kirk Anne Taylor, CAPS‘ executive director

CAPS is part of a growing trend. Like similar programs in Missouri, Illinois, Maine, Mississippi, and New York City, CAPS is using the career-technical education, or CTE, model to prepare young people for the green jobs of the future before they get out of high school. 

For Gonzalez, a self-described tree-hugger, the program has changed the way she looks at her hometown. These days, she downright appreciates it, “because I’ve had the opportunity to see that sustainability is everywhere.”

Related: Activist students go to summer camp to learn how to help institute a ‘green new deal’ on their campuses

CAPS started in part because a local solar engineer, Bill Kelly, wanted to share his expertise with students in the school district’s career-technical education program. Kirk Anne Taylor, who has a deep background in education and nonprofit management, joined last year as executive director with a vision to expand the model across the state, and far beyond just solar power. 

CAPS students are trained for school-year and summer internships that teach them about the environment and how to lower the carbon footprint in school buildings and the larger community. They earn California’s minimum wage, $15.50 an hour. 

For instance, Gonzalez and her classmates held a bike rodeo for younger students. They’ve created detailed maps of traffic and sidewalk hazards around schools, to promote more students walking and biking to schools.

Other CAPS participants give presentations, educating fellow students about climate change and green jobs. They are helping manage routes and charging schedules for the school’s growing fleet of electric buses. They work with farmers to get local food in the cafeterias.

Their most specialized and skilled task is completing detailed energy audits of each building in the district and continuously monitoring performance. In the first year of the program, some of these young energy detectives discovered a freezer in a high school holding a single leftover popsicle. Powering this one freezer over the summer vacation meant about $300 in wasted energy costs, so they got permission to pull the plug. 

The popsicles add up. Over the past few years, by reviewing original building blueprints, inputting data into endless Excel spreadsheets, and cajoling their classmates and teachers into schoolwide efficiency competitions, CAPS students have saved the district $850,000 on a $2.9 million energy budget — this in a district that was already getting about two-thirds of its energy from onsite solar. And 100 percent of the most recent participants are going on to college, far higher than the students who aren’t in the district’s career-technical education program. 

Related: ‘Teaching among the ashes’: It’s not just your home that’s burned, it’s everyone’s’

CAPS is small, just 18 students this year. But its model sits right at the intersection of several big problems and opportunities facing the country. One is that in the wake of the pandemic, public school achievement, attendance, and college enrollment are all suffering, especially in working-class districts like Porterville. This is likely not entirely unconnected to the fact that young people are suffering a well-publicized mental health crisis, of which eco-anxiety is one part. 

Career technical education programs like this one have been shown to lead to higher graduation rates and to put more students, especially working-class students, into good jobs.  

And there’s massive demand for green workers in particular: Skilled tradespeople like electricians are already in short supply, making it difficult for homeowners and businesses to install clean energy technologies. The Inflation Reduction Act and associated investments are expected to create nine million new green jobs over the next decade. 

Some CAPS students are also changing community attitudes toward climate change, starting with their own families.

Gonzalez says her dad is skeptical of climate change and the progressive politics it’s associated with, while her mom seems passive — “like, what can I do?” But they supported her involvement in CAPS because it’s a paying job, and recently her dad said, “I’m proud of you for doing what you like to do.” 

She’s heading to California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in the fall to study environmental science and management. 

Related: Are we ready? How we are teaching – or not teaching – kids about climate change

David Proctor, 17, grew up the oldest of seven. His mother didn’t believe in climate change, Proctor says, but grudgingly agreed to the CAPS program. It helps that Proctor is earning money for his work monitoring the district’s solar performance. He loves every minute. 

He’s on track to graduate this coming December and be the first in his family to go on to college. He wants to combine his interest in climate change and public health. 

Jocelyn Gee is the head of community growth for the Green Jobs Board, which has a reach of 96,000 people and focuses on creating equitable access to high-quality green jobs. They see a huge demand for programs like CAPS. 

“We get a lot of requests from college students and high school students about what kind of roles are there for them,” Gee said. “This field hasn’t existed for that long. There are very few people. So you need to invest in training the next generation now so a few years on you will have the brightest in the climate movement.” 

This field hasn’t existed for that long. There are very few people. So you need to invest in training the next generation now so a few years on you will have the brightest in the climate movement.” 

Jocelyn Gee, head of community growth for the Green Jobs Board

They said the strength of a program like CAPS is that it’s making life better for Porterville residents right now. “I really think that hyperlocal solutions are the way to go,” Gee said. “It’s great when green jobs involve the frontline communities in solutions.”  

One factor that distinguishes CAPS from other green CTE programs is that it’s also designed to address the opportunity for public schools themselves to decarbonize. Schools collectively have 100,000 publicly owned buildings, and energy costs are typically the second largest line item in budgets after salaries. The Inflation Reduction Act, along with Biden’s infrastructure bill, contains billions of dollars intended specifically to address school decarbonization, but many districts lack the grant-writing and other expertise required to chip the money loose.

In partnership with CAPS, the Porterville Unified School District, or PUSD, recently learned they’ll be bringing in $5.8 million over three years from the federal Renew America’s Schools grant program. The money will fund lighting, HVAC, and building automation upgrades — all needs identified by the students’ energy audits — as well as an expansion of the internship program itself. Only 24 grants were awarded nationwide out of more than 1,000 applications, and the education component made Porterville’s stand out. PUSD and CAPS have also scored a $3.6 million grant from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) for a green schoolyards program. 

The district is also applying for an Environmental Protection Agency grant that would allow them to go from six electric school buses to 41, nearly the entire fleet. The vision is to train students to maintain and repair these as well. CAPS students have already started analyzing and planning more energy-efficient routes that allow for charging. 

“The issues we’re trying to address are common, and we’re delivering real benefits: environmentally, in terms of student outcomes, in terms of cost savings,” said Kirk Anne Taylor, CAPS‘ executive director. CAPS is expanding to three other districts in California, with more in the works, and the program in Porterville has drawn visitors from Oregon, New Mexico, and as far away as Missouri.  

For Elijah Garcia, a graduating senior headed to the University of California, San Diego to study chemical engineering, the work has given him a newfound commitment to pursuing a sustainable career. It’s also given him hope for the future. 

“We’re trying to change something — climate change — that when you look at it in a vacuum it’s, like, insurmountable. But this is boots on the ground. It’s a bit more tangible. I can’t do everything, but I can do this little bit.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The post This California high school includes sustainability and green jobs in its curriculum appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Tempers get short. Test scores suffer. On the worst days, schools close, and students lose days of learning while parents’ schedules are disrupted.

Yorkwood Elementary in Baltimore, before it finally got air conditioning last year, was subject to closure by the district on any day the forecast hit 90 degrees by 10 a.m. And the number of those days has been rising over time.

“I remember one year we literally had seven [closure] days before we were able to have a full week of school because of the heat,” said Tonya Redd, the principal.

July 2023 was the world’s hottest month on record. And America’s schools weren’t built for this. According to a 2021 study by the Center for Climate Integrity, more than 13,700 public schools that did not need cooling systems in 1970 have installed — or will need to install — HVAC systems by 2025,based on the increasing number of very hot days during the school year. Total estimated cost: over $40 billion.

The good news is, there are many design and architectural innovations that can keep students, faculty and staff comfortable, while also creating healthier, greener and even more engaging places to learn. And there’s federal funding to pay for it.

But, installing air conditioners without making other renovations, which is often the cheapest and most expedient option, raises a school’s fossil fuel consumption, ultimately making the problem of climate change worse.

Baltimore is an example of a district that’s had to rapidly upgrade for a changing climate. Six years ago, 75 out of its 140 school buildings, including Yorkwood Elementary, lacked air conditioning.

Now, that number is down to 11, according to Cyndi Smith, the district’s executive director for facilities planning, design and construction. “It has been a big challenge,” she said. “We have the oldest average-age buildings [of every district] in the state, going back to the late 1800s.”  

Nationally, classroom heat is an environmental justice issue. This is because Black and Hispanic students are concentrated in urban areas that are subject to the heat island effect, in the South and Southwest, and in school districts with older facilities. In Baltimore, Maryland, just below the Mason-Dixon line, almost three quarters of the district’s students are Black, and another 17 percent are Hispanic. A 2020 paper calculated that excess heat might be responsible for as much as 5 percent of the race-based gap in test scores.

At Yorkwood, 96 percent of the students are Black. Redd saw the heat affect her students in multiple ways. “The children would be lethargic, due to the heat in the classroom.” Students used to sit for high stakes tests in the spring in sweltering weather. And, until this year, they couldn’t attend summer learning at their home campus; again, too hot.

Having air conditioning last school year “has actually been amazing,” Redd said. Instead of students trudging into the first days of school, resigned to the heat, she said, “There are smiles on the faces of students, teachers and parents.”

The state of Maryland committed a decade ago to universal A/C in schools. They have paid for all this with a combination of local, state and federal funds, and not without some partisan back-and-forth.

“I remember one year we literally had seven [closure] days before we were able to have a full week of school because of the heat.”

Tonya Redd, the principal of Yorkwood Elementary in Baltimore

Baltimore is one of the first round of recipients of the Renew America’s Schools grant, a clean-energy program that is part of the bipartisan infrastructure law; 88 percent of all applications included HVAC upgrades.

The Inflation Reduction Act also includes tax credits for geothermal heat pumps, a more efficient option for both heating and cooling. Depending on certain conditions, the tax credit could go up to 50 percent, according to a guide from the Aspen Institute’s This Is Planet Ed (where, full disclosure, I am an advisor). School districts can receive this credit as a cash payment with the new direct pay mechanism in the IRA, but details on how this will work will be forthcoming from the IRS.

Smith said that, ultimately, Baltimore’s education budget hasn’t allowed the district to improve energy efficiency in the ways she would have liked. “We need [new] windows in a lot of our buildings. We did kind of have to cut back and say, OK, even though it would be great for energy savings in the long run, the A/C was our priority.”

Monica Goldson, who just joined Maryland’s state board of education, said her priority is to figure out how to “maximize efficiency while also meeting [districts’] climate change action plan recommendations.” This, she says, requires investing not just in HVAC and insulation, but in professional development for building maintenance staff.

When districts have the money and time, schools can be reimagined from the ground up to cope with extreme weather.

Dan Boggio, the founder of architecture firm PBK, which primarily designs schools and campuses, said he has seen increased interest in what he calls “hardening buildings against heat” over the past decade. When schools pull out all the stops for efficiency, he said, “We think we can come very close to saving 20 percent of the energy that the building uses over the year.”

The Alief Independent School District in southwest Houston, Texas, worked with PBK to create an exemplary early learning center that opened last August, 2022.

To start, the district built on a site that was five acres larger than they’d normally choose and left it in its natural state as much as possible. “We’re always looking for sites with trees,” said Boggio. “It’s a heat sink.” Stormwater on the site runs off into ponds and wetlands, reducing flood risk — the more typical stormwater setup is “an ugly concrete pool with chain link fence around it,” said Alief’s Jeff DeLisle, director of maintenance and operations.

With input from the nonprofit The Nature Conservancy, landscapers planted the green space with native plants, grasses, flowering plants, trees and shrubs — a prairie landscape that resembles the Houston of a century ago. The green areas, water features and reduced concrete minimize the urban heat-island effect, and they’re already starting to attract native birds. The whole area is used as an outdoor classroom for the Pre-K students.

“Used to be, our buildings were designed for 95 degrees max. Over the past 5 or 10 years as we’ve built new buildings, as we’ve remodeled buildings, we’ve asked our designs to plan for over 100 degree temperatures.”

Jeff DeLisle, director of maintenance and operations, Alief Independent School District, Texas

The early learning center was also designed with a “front porch” area of large overhangs that give children a shaded place to play. When Boggio gets a chance, he designs buildings with the longest axis east-west. “Believe it or not, it’s easy to shade the sun on the south side; it’s almost impossible on the west,” he said. The angle of the light comes too low for window shades. 

Houston area schools have had air-conditioning since the 1960s, but now they need to do more, DeLisle said. “Temperatures are changing; conditions are getting worse. Used to be, our buildings were designed for 95 degrees max. Over the past 5 or 10 years as we’ve built new buildings, as we’ve remodeled buildings, we’ve asked our designs to plan for over 100 degree temperatures.”

This means heavy overhangs on windows, coatings on the glass to reduce UV rays, and white roofs to reflect heat. And then there are the behavioral shifts — like calling the groundskeepers in at 5:30 am, and pushing football practice into the evening.

Even when districts are doing everything they can to meet the demands of the moment, the future still feels uncertain. When Anthony Mays, the district superintendent of Alief, is asked what measures he imagines taking in 10 years as Houston’s weather continues to change, he grimaces. “That is an extremely scary thought,” he said.

“You see the strain on the machinery we have now. I don’t know what technology will look like to try to accommodate these extreme temperatures.”

This column about climate and design was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Sometime this fall, in a classroom in New York City, second graders will use pipe cleaners and Post-it notes to build a model of a tree that could cool a city street. They’ll shine a lamp on their mini trees to see what shade patterns they cast. Meanwhile, in Seattle, kindergartners might take a “wondering walk” outside and come up with questions about the worms that show up on the sidewalk after it rains. 

This summer, teachers around the country are planning these lessons and more, in professional development programs designed to answer a pressing need: preparing teachers to teach about the climate crisis and empower students to act. 

“I believe that the climate movement is the most interesting movement in education,” said Oren Pizmony-Levy, associate professor of International and Comparative Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. (Disclosure: The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.) Schools have to address student climate anxiety, provide them knowledge and skills, including the ability to recognize misinformation, and empower them to act, while schools also “clean up their act” by decarbonizing their physical infrastructure.

Teachers don’t necessarily feel prepared to lead this work yet, said Pizmony-Levy.

“We’ve been doing research with New York City Public Schools for the past 6-7 years. About a third of teachers say they teach about climate change in a meaningful way. Those who don’t, give the following reasons: 1) It has nothing to do with my subject; 2) I don’t know enough about it; 3) I don’t feel comfortable talking about it; and 4) I don’t have the right materials,” he said.

National polls by Education Week and the North American Association for Environmental Education bear these views out. Three-quarters of teachers, and 80 percent of principals and district leaders in NAAEE’s poll agreed, “Climate change will have an enormous impact on students’ futures, and it is irresponsible not to address the problem and solutions in school.” Yet only 21 percent of teachers felt “very informed” on the topic and only 44 percent said they had the right resources to teach it most of the time or always. 

On July 17-20, Pizmony-Levy led a first-of-its-kind professional development institute for NYC public elementary school teachers who want to teach climate change in any subject. Teachers who signed up were responding in part to Mayor Eric Adams’ Earth Day commitment to soup up green learning. Climate lessons are supposed to be taught next year in every school in the nation’s largest public school system. 

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost all topics — even PE

Forty teachers from every borough gathered in a heavily air-conditioned room that bore the sweet scent of smoke from the barbecue restaurant next door. They heard lectures from climate scientists, and talks on related topics like environmental justice; learned about efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of New York City public schools, and how to address common student misconceptions, for example, “If it’s called global warming, why do we have things like the polar vortex?” 

“Teachers can’t give this information if they don’t have it, and our generation of educators, it’s not something we learned in school,” said Alisha Bennett, a school social worker in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, who participated in the training. She came because of her strong interest in infusing climate justice into her school’s equity work. 

Oré Adelaja, a third grade teacher, said she “just learned about environmental racism,” in the training. Her school is in East New York, a primarily Black and Hispanic neighborhood with high rates of childhood asthma. She envisions asking her students to document the resources like green space and trash bins available in their community, and write letters to their city council representative to get more of what the neighborhood needs. She said, “Let’s give them the data points to critically think and draw conclusions.”

In a session focused on teacher leadership, Adelaja came up with a nature-based metaphor for her work: “A bird who every day came to the nest and fed its young until the young learned to fly — giving my kids the information and knowledge, and eventually that agency and self-sufficiency to find their own solutions to their own problems.” 

The sessions received funding through a $25 million National Science Foundation grant to Columbia University. The teachers participating committed to creating lesson plans — like the shade simulation — that will be made available freely for others to use on platforms including the website SubjectToClimate.org. 

Related: Climate change: Are we ready? 

Megan Bang, a professor of the learning sciences and director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University is training cohorts of Pre-K through fifth grade teachers this summer in Washington State, Illinois, Michigan and Louisiana through her project,  Learning in Places, which is funded through the National Science Foundation. (Disclosure: Bang is a member of the K-12 action commission at This Is Planet Ed’, where I’m also an advisor.) She said this teacher education is designed to be intellectually demanding. 

“We just did an interview with an incoming teacher who told us: ‘In 20 years I’ve never been asked to think like this,’” Bang said. “If we don’t offer educators the opportunity to rethink their intellectual ideas — about climate change, science, inequality — it makes it really difficult to do this work.”

Bang, who is partly of Ojibwe descent, said she looks at different mental models of the relationship between humans and the natural world — do we see ourselves as apart-from nature, or part of nature? Broadly speaking, she said, in indigenous traditions, it’s the latter. 

Drawing on the tension between the two worldviews, her work presents students with moral dilemmas about nature and opportunities to take civic action on behalf of the wild world. She said that just giving kids facts is not going to be effective.

“In most of education we think knowledge leads to difference in behavior,” she said. “Social science does not support that. In the 90s and early 2000s we thought if people understood the carbon cycle, they would know why climate change matters.” That didn’t pan out, to say the least.

Instead, students in the “Learning in Places” curriculum are encouraged to ask “should-we” questions — values questions. For example, in the worm inquiry, created by a Seattle teacher, students asked: Should we rescue the worms from the sidewalks so they can burrow back into the wet ground? If we do, it will benefit the worms; if we don’t, it could benefit the birds who eat them. 

Taking science out of the lab and immersing students in the living world, like parks and gardens, buffers some of the negative views of climate change that even the youngest students come to school with, Bang said. According to her research, “Five-year-olds tend to have ‘the earth is scorched and unsavable’ models when they come to school. Kids come in with, ‘Humans harm the earth and the earth is dying,’” she said. “That doesn’t motivate action or change.” 

This column about teaching climate change was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Climate change is here, now, lapping at the walls of higher education — quite literally.

Nathalie Saladrigas is an undergraduate at Miami Dade College, where her off-campus housing regularly floods. “You can’t even leave your car in the parking lot because it will get flooded — I mean up to your knees flooded,” she told me. 

And 1,400 miles northeast, the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook has also flooded, thanks to Hurricane Ida, a 2021 storm strengthened by climate change that cut across the continent all the way from the Gulf Coast to the Northeast. Maurie McInnis, president of the SUNY-Stony Brook, vividly remembers the stresses of that fall semester’s opening. “A big rainstorm, and all of a sudden we had to find beds for 400 students,” she said.

Higher ed is a massive, diverse sector with roughly 20 million students in the U.S. alone and a major physical and carbon footprint in all 50 states. Universities, for decades, have expanded society’s knowledge of climate impacts and climate solutions. But some leaders argue it’s time for these institutions to remake themselves wholesale for this rising tide of rapid change.

Two announcements last month indicate potential ways forward. SUNY-Stony Brook will anchor The New York Climate Exchange, a brand-new, $700 million campus on Governors Island in New York. And, This Is Planet Ed, an initiative of the Aspen Institute, launched a Higher Ed Climate Action Task Force, uniting university leaders and other stakeholders like Saladrigas, a climate activist, to make recommendations for action across the sector. (Full disclosure, I’m a senior advisor to This Is Planet Ed.)

John King, the new chancellor of the State University of New York system as well as the co-chair of This Is Planet Ed, just appointed the system’s first-ever chief sustainability officer and executive director of climate action at SUNY. The appointment reflects King’s belief that colleges and universities can’t afford to engage with climate solely on an intellectual level, or as a narrowly focused topic in the sciences; they must also walk the walk, by rapidly decarbonizing their own infrastructure. 

“It is my hope that more higher education systems will see SUNY’s efforts and recognize the potential for system-wide climate action, to reduce our emissions, prepare the clean workforce, advance equity and environmental justice, spur innovation, and empower the next generation to lead a sustainable future,” said King, a former secretary of education under President Barack Obama.

Related: Climate change: Are we ready?

It’s quite a to-do list, but what does that look like on the ground? McInnis of Stony Brook has a vision. The New York Climate Exchange, she said, won’t put shovels to earth until 2025. But its leaders have already established a thriving matrix of partnerships among groups that don’t always naturally speak the same language — from fellow institutions like Georgia Tech, Pace University and Pratt Institute, to corporations like IBM, to environmental justice nonprofits like WE ACT in Harlem, to the New York State Iron Workers. Among other initiatives, the iron workers union will have input into a job-training program affiliated with the campus that will be readying the necessary workers to rip out thousands and thousands of oil- and natural gas-burning boilers, the better to convert New York City’s buildings to clean energy. In fact, green job trainees will, it’s planned, outnumber traditional students on the campus by 10 to 1.

One day, McInnis said, elementary school students will arrive by electric ferry for field trips, observing “living laboratories” that model “new ways of building, powering, treating coastlines.” Four hundred thousand square feet of buildings will be powered by clean energy with backup battery storage. The campus will capture and reuse gray water, and keep 95 percent of the trash it generates out of landfills. It will be filled with undergrads, grad students and professors from Stony Brook and partner institutions, some visiting for a “domestic study abroad.” And one day, she said, the campus will welcome leaders from around the world. “With time we hope to host major convenings of groups of other people who want to talk about climate change and how cities need to respond,” McInnis told me. “We want to be a global convener for the important conversations we all need to have on the most critical issue of our time.”

Every university president probably dreams of becoming a “global convener” in one way or another, and of winning $150 million in philanthropic funds to do so, as this initiative did. (The city will also contribute, but much of the projected $700 million price tag is still to be raised). But, it might seem a strange time for such boosterism, considering that enrollment in higher education is plummeting nationwide and is down 20 percent over the last decade at SUNY colleges and universities, half of which occurred during Covid.

Bryan Alexander is a higher education futurist whose latest book, Universities on Fire, is all about colleges’ responses to the climate crisis. He sounds a note of muted optimism around the New York Climate Exchange vision. “On the one hand it’s very exciting to see the state commit so much funding,” he said. Yet, he added, “the idea of starting a new campus from scratch is interesting and also very risky.” Especially in New York State, which, he noted, already has quite a bit of aging higher ed infrastructure, like McInnis’s flood-prone dorms back on Long Island, which date to the 1960s and 1970s.

Still, he said that universities have historically executed big cultural pivots by establishing greenfield campuses where new norms of collaboration, learning and knowledge production can be set forth. And when it comes to climate change, that’s exactly what’s required: “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,” Alexander said. “This is a moment of civilizational transformation and we can’t be left out of it. Every aspect of academia gets to play a role.”

Related: COLUMN: How student school board members are driving climate action

That was a common sentiment at the first This Is Planet Ed Higher Ed Task Force listening session in early May, presided over by Kim Hunter Reed, the commissioner of higher education for Louisiana, and Mildred García, the president of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. Essentially two dueling messages emerged: It’s a really difficult time for higher education to take on a new, major, paradigm shift, what with funding crunches, political headwinds in red states, and post-Covid enrollment syndrome; and, there’s no choice but to act big and fast.

Students are certainly contributing to that sense of urgency. A great deal of climate action at universities has been driven by student activism. And students today see climate as joined with other urgent struggles for justice. “As a low income person of color, I know a lot of communities like mine are directly impacted by climate change,” said Saladrigas. “It’s a lot of intersectional issues. And learning about climate change is inaccessible.”

To Saladrigas, the political environment in Florida feels particularly discouraging to climate learning; she plans to transfer out of state as soon as she can. “If you don’t have resources,” she said, “you can’t allow for students to learn more about how to make a change.”

This column about climate solutions in higher ed was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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