What remains a challenge both nationally and at Lowell is building optimism around our ability to solve climate change: only 8% of youth agreed that we can and will do something to mitigate climate change in a recent study , and a mere 5% of Lowell students indicated they believe their generation will solve climate change. While acknowledging the receptive audience for implementing the curriculum, the results relating to increased student engagement, increased reading scores and favorable response to a humanities-focused climate curriculum are nevertheless significant and worth building on as an approach to middle school climate education. Further hypotheses are generated such as the claim that climate change as an engaging topic can help boost student performance in core academic disciplines , requiring further testing via controlled experiments. The time period between 6th and 8th grade is a significant youth development stage during which students develop capacity in knowledge retention and empathy and gain exposure to many new topics, and yet the 6th graders performed equal to or above the 8th graders on most climate knowledge and engagement questions. They shared information learned with families and friends more often than their 8th grade peers learning about climate change through science only, hydroponic shelves generating important hypotheses for CCE/IGL scholars . Results and best practices from this case study should be applied intentionally to other classrooms and school contexts.
The web of support is a crucial enabling factor as well as the participation of key influencers, which must be identified in other contexts. The Lowell School curriculum coordinator suggests several vehicles for integrating similar curricula into more structured, state-mandated public school subject matter: through choice of reading materials in civics classes, suggested options for student independent research projects, and current events classes at the high school level. She outlines three specific opportunities for incorporating climate education into social studies classrooms through tweaks to what is already happening, rather than major curriculum overhauls: 1) in elementary school states and regions studies, where studying the climate of the state or region is already an explicit objective, 2) middle school global geography classes, and 3) in high school current events classes. She sees these as opportunities to “lean into the climate change challenges and how people are addressing them in different contexts” , while minimizing instructional tradeoffs. The Director concurs, adding, “for independent schools this change is very easy. But for public schools, there’s so much you can do with this curriculum too. If you have to teach about government, geography, or history you can use pieces of this [integrated into pre-existing units and curriculum mandates]” . Preparing teachers to be effective conduits of climate education is a crucial step in humanity’s response to climate change, as “teachers occupy a social role as cultural authority in traditional classroom contexts and are therefore differentially powerful actors in educational spaces” . Teachers are important influencers of what “comes to matter” in the classroom based on their ability to mobilize and communicate their own knowledge effectively .
A recent National Academies Board on Science Education report concludes that “ultimately, the ability of the elementary and secondary school systems to provide comprehensive climate literacy education will depend on the systematic availability of quality curriculum resources, impact of curriculum mandates such as state standards and assessment, and, importantly, the preparation of teachers” . The Lowell curriculum coordinator is keen to put these recommendations into practice, through co-facilitating a Summer Institute for Climate Education with Climate Generation at Lowell School in Summer 2019. The 3-day institute will be geared towards Humanities educators. In order to scale up and improve existing CCE PD offerings, policy support and funding will be necessary, as well as additional CCE research focused on evaluating PD opportunities and how well they address the needs of both science educators and those from other disciplines. The opportunity to provide integrated Social Studies + STEM PD trainings around climate change is a key area for growth as more states consider adopting climate literacy and education policies. Based on our findings that humanities-focused climate education shows promise in engaging students through narrative, storytelling, and local community projects, and building upon climate communications research that similarly emphasizes a storytelling approach, humanities CCE should be further implemented and investigated through comparative analyses and case studies in other locations that employ a similar climate literacy assessment methodology.
This study will benefit greatly from replication particularly in public schools, which are more challenging environments in which to innovate on curriculum content, but more reflective of the U.S. student experience. The time for further study is ripe, with national polls indicating public opinion is strongly in favor of climate education, at 79% supporting the teaching of climate change in public schools .Students receiving the humanities-focused climate curriculum exhibit academic gains in reading comprehension and enthusiasm for the curriculum content. Nonetheless, as seen above, the action/solutions focus can be strengthened by better incorporating authentic and meaningful student climate action projects in the local community. This emphasis on experiential learning may lead to even more effective outcomes as students become empowered to act on their climate concerns. This calls for additional partnerships and planning in order to implement, and may include field trips, hands-on schoolyard greening projects, contacting local elected officials, and developing community-school collaborations that allow for service-learning projects to have meaningful impacts. Future studies should focus on the student action elements of CCE, and how to most effectively build the education into action pathway, as the “action” piece remains elusive and difficult to measure in many CCE curriculum studies and climate literacy assessments. To investigate this question, I next look at bringing climate education to school gardens and educational farms.Building off of expressed desires for implementing climate education in school garden classrooms , this study examines problems of method in two dimensions: methods of delivering climate instruction, and methods of evaluating climate literacy. It is a case of experiential curriculum development and piloting in San Juan County, WA and Oakland, CA. Climate change communications, CCE, and food literacy literatures offer useful strategies for developing students into informed decision makers capable of addressing climate change in their communities . Drawing on the existing bodies of scholarship, the curriculum features climate education activities in the school garden in order to evaluate whether this represents an effective experiential climate education strategy. This study addresses the research questions: 1) What are best practices or effective strategies for delivering climate change curriculum that leads to increases in student climate literacy? 2) How do we currently measure and study climate literacy? And 3) What is the impact on teacher competency and student climate literacy of a 6-week experiential climate curriculum taught in school garden classrooms? Experiential climate change education engages students in hands-on activities and projects that are solution-oriented alongside the presentation of climate science. This approach builds on the best practices of both experiential learning theory and climate change communications by incorporating personal action accompanied by reflection and fostering hope and positive engagement around a complex global issue. By making climate education experiential, it is more salient and actionable for students rather than paralyzing.
A school garden is commonly identified by school and district leaders as an effective platform for experiential learning opportunities that also can boost academic performance, attendance, behavior, and student health . Garden educators often recognize the climate benefits of local food production, vertical growing racks but this connection is seldom passed along to student gardeners. Thus, gardens were chosen as the context of study for implementing an experiential climate curriculum. The pilot schools represent “early adopters” of climate-friendly schoolyards and climate change curriculum, which is not yet widespread in the U.S. . I use a small sample size to generate further hypotheses on what strategies work for bringing student beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors in line with well-defined actions/solutions for climate mitigation. The case studies are therefore an opportunity to learn from schools where climate education shifts are already underway, one in a rural agricultural setting and the other school district in a progressive urban environment known for food justice activism. Both contexts are examples of high community awareness of climate change : thus, if particular CCE strategies cannot succeed in these contexts, the chances for their widespread success are low.Oakland Unified School District is a national leader in the school lunch reform movement. The district is working towards establishing school gardens at all schools, as well as a Central Kitchen and urban farm to provide centralized distribution of locally grown produce to school cafeterias. However, like the San Juan Islands, leadership in school food systems and local sourcing is not yet accompanied by corresponding leadership in climate change education. There is interest at the district and school level to incorporate climate change into school garden classrooms and more thoroughly across multiple school subjects, but preliminary action steps are just beginning. Partnerships with community groups and local universities are seen as a desirable and realistic way to incorporate climate change into both science and garden classrooms. In consultation with the OUSD School Gardens Coordinator and the University of California Cooperative Extension Bay Area Urban Agriculture Advisor, I identified 3 schools for a climate change curriculum pilot in spring and fall 2017. The pilots were assessed with the same student survey and teacher interview guide used at the Lopez school. Pre-implementation interviews with educators and students in the San Juan Islands and Oakland Unified School District show that there is a strong interest in incorporating climate change into school garden educational curriculum, accompanied by a need for training in order to do so effectively. Adults often recognize the climate change connection to their farm to school activities but acknowledge that students are not yet taught about these connections. Adding to the education-action gap, teachers often do not feel qualified to teach students about climate change without being content experts themselves. Preliminary program evaluations and discussion themes at National Farm to School conferences indicate that the education core element is lagging behind the other core Farm to School program elements: presence of school gardens and local procurement . The lack of comprehensive or strategic integration of garden based education into broader environmental and climate educational contexts leaves many garden educators searching for curriculum independently and not utilizing garden classroom time to its full potential; climate change is a glaring omission in all garden curricula and evaluative studies examined for this research project. Furthermore, integration of program evaluation methodologies and consistent tracking of farm to school activities remains a challenge for researchers and practitioners .Figure 20 summarizes the chain of activities relevant for this study, which addresses method in two dimensions: pedagogical method and evaluation method . The methods for curriculum development followed processes common to teacher training programs, and incorporate best practices from both critical pedagogy and experiential learning theory. Critical and experiential pedagogy places the teacher as designers of the educational experience, as coaches or facilitators, and students as leaders of their own learning. Both teachers and students have agency to ask and answer questions, and outcomes are necessarily more fluid and less predictable than pedagogy that lends itself to standardized test-taking. Importantly, critical pedagogy implies an embedded project of unearthing and subverting oppression . The curriculum content is the product of collaboration and feedback with education nonprofits and partner teachers, following participatory action research principles. Initial ideas and activity outlines emerged following interviews and focus groups with school garden educators in the San Juan Islands in spring 2016, as well as conversations with Oakland garden educators in fall 2016. A key partner in the curriculum development process is the nationally recognized nonprofit Climate Generation: A Will Steger Legacy, the source of the climate curriculum that was modified to provide a food/ag frame around the six-lesson structure. Food is a powerful frame through which to make the climate change problem more concrete and “close to home,” as it implies both a social and essential daily activity. The garden, meanwhile, provides a useful metaphor for the complex global climate system. The curriculum directly connects climate science to community and local action in the garden, thus linking food and climate systems. This systems-thinking lens aligns with Next Generation Science Standards , something that motivates teacher participation if their schools have adopted NGSS.