A couple of years ago at the start of the academic year, I utilized climate change as a case study to understanding how power functions, as well as how political issues look different at different levels of analysis (community, local, national, regional, international, global). It turned out to be one of the most energizing starts to a school year ever, buoyed by student enthusiasm and interest for the topic, as well as the September 2019 Climate Strike that a number of my students helped to lead at my school.
Since that time, I’ve been doing a lot of learning around climate change and the teaching of climate change in the social studies classroom. Despite the challenges of remote teaching, I think I did the best job teaching climate change this year of any year I’ve engaged the topic in my classes, and I increasingly feel like climate change is a topic that as Social Studies educators we have an obligation to cover in our school buildings.
Social Studies educators struggle often with what a good friend of mine has called “the tyranny of time.” We feel pressure to cover everything to ensure that students build background knowledge around important topics, and sometimes are concerned that if we don’t cover a topic that students might never engage on it. There’s probably some truth to that, but increasingly I think depth is more important than breadth, and that we should facilitate deep and sustained learning around topics our students care about to more deeply engage them in ‘sticky’ learning.
For the past three years in my classes, alongside gun violence, climate change has been one of the topics students have expressed the most interest in learning more about. Climate change hasn’t traditionally been a part of the High School Social Studies curriculum, but we cannot ignore it, regardless of the specific discipline we teach in. No other issue we can teach about has the power (and likelihood) to drastically influence the future of all humans on this planet. Not only is the issue incredibly high interest and relevant to our students, but also the global climate change movement is being led by young people not so different from them. This presents opportunities for students to move into hopeful action rather than stewing in what is admittedly a very depressing set of scientific projections about the future.
Where does climate change live in our curriculum? Obviously we are not scientists, so it is clear our place is not to teach the science of climate change, and our students learn plenty about the science of climate change in science classes. However, climate change can and should be examined through the lenses we use in our disciplines.
As historians, we can open questions for students to consider how and why our use of coal and oil have allowed for unprecedented economic growth, endangering the future of most human life on the planet, and we can create opportunities for students to consider why climate change activists have failed to create meaningful action to avert a climate crisis. As psychologists, we can have students analyze errors in human perception that allow us to consider climate change tomorrow’s problem while we hurtle towards a future with hundreds of millions of climate refugees resulting from environmental devastation. As political scientists, we can have students examine why both our international and domestic systems have failed to respond appropriately to this coming crisis. As sociologists, we can have students investigate the roots of global inequities like colonialism and white supremacy to help them identify why this crisis will disproportionately impact the world’s poor.
A couple of books, in particular, have helped me to build a useful foundation of knowledge that I have brought to bear over the last couple of years. First, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells focuses on the social, economic, and political consequences of climate change. If you want to read one thing on climate change, this would be my recommendation, as it is exhaustively researched and many of the linkages discussed above are at least briefly mentioned. Warning: it’s pretty depressing. The Great Derangement by Amitov Ghosh is similarly depressing but more literary and beautifully written. Some of the later chapters on history and politics work well excerpted for students. Losing Earth: A Recent History by Nathaniel Rich focuses on the many failures to address climate change throughout the 1980s. This one is probably less useful from a teaching perspective.
The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, negotiators of the Paris Climate Accord is surprisingly hopeful for a book focused on the politics of climate change. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac do a nice job outlining many of the issues, as well as a chapter focusing on “doing what is necessary.” I had students do presentations on the sections in the aforementioned chapter, analyzing the different elements of their proposals as to how people should take action. This was very high interest, and the resulting student work and discussions were exceptional. It also helped that this was a hopeful take. My students tended to be a little more pessimistic, but confronted with climate pessimism the push to take action is inherently hopeful.
Finally, the Zinn Ed Project and Rethinking Schools also have some useful resources, In particular, I heavily modified this role play to better fit my course content and remote world, and it was a big hit with students. We had a thought-provoking discussion, and it caused students to understand more deeply about some of the impediments to addressing climate change built into the structure of our international system.
In short, you can’t go wrong unless you choose not to engage it at all. We have an obligation to address what will probably be one of the most significant challenges of our time.