Climate in Classrooms

January 18, 2012, 1:40 PM

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Jared FlesherStudents at a New Jersey elementary school got a lesson in climate change — and solar power — from a solar panel manufacturer in 2009.

There’s much to explore about the challenges in teaching about the evolving relationship between people and their climate.

This subject was once pretty straightforward. After all, it was a relationship that was largely a one-way phenomenon. Climate changed. People adapted or moved. (The extraordinary books of Brian Fagan are an ideal guide.)

As humanity’s growth spurt plays out, the accumulating greenhouse gases from fossil fuel combustion — along with the impacts on clouds or sunshine from other emissions and impacts from land surfaces — have made this a two-way relationship. And that makes teaching about this subject particularly challenging, given the durably wide range of perceptions not just of the science, but of how to respond to it.

Fights have long been brewing over how to teach the science without spin. (Remember the fight between Laurie David and the National Science Teachers Association over “An Inconvenient Truth”?)

A Los Angeles Times article few days ago provided a fresh look at the tussle over global warming in classrooms, focusing on a move by the National Center for Science Education to add a substantial climate component to its longstanding effort to keep ideology and religion out of classes on biology and evolution.

Leslie Kaufman explored other examples in The Times in 2010.

With all of this in mind, I’m going to try to do a series of pieces on educational experiments aimed at exploring climate science and climate choices (hopefully not mashing these two very different subjects up) in ways that foster understanding and engagement.

One such experiment is a new course at the University of Colorado, “Inside the Greenhouse,” that’s focused on the second area — the interface of climate and society. The course melds the arts and environmental studies. Here’s more on the course from one of its creators, Maxwell Boykoff, an assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado (and author of a valuable new book on climate in the press):

This week, at the University of Colorado, Boulder,Professor Beth Osnes from the Department of Theater and Dance and I begin teaching a new interdisciplinary course called ‘Inside the Greenhouse.’ (We are embarking on this interdisciplinary effort thanks to funding from local residents Grace and Gordon Gamm.)

In the class, we’ll be working to understand and engage with how climate issues are/can be communicated and framed, by analyzing previously created expressions from a variety of media (interactive theater, film, fine art, performance art, television programming, blogs for examples) and then we’ll be creating a show by the same name that’ll contain interviews and student work. Our program ‘Inside the Greenhouse’ will be produced also in the spirit of the James Lipton-led ‘Inside the Actors Studio’ [a course at my school, Pace University] that has been such an effective vehicle for interrogating and enhancing the ‘process’ behind the ‘product’ of performance content.

At present, Beth and I have 40 eager students from a variety of majors and disciplines signed up for the course, with others on a waiting list to get in. Based on early feedback that we’ve received on the course plans, students seem like they’re aching for these new opportunities to improve on what Dan Kahan has called “the cultural meaning of how the issue is framed”. In other words, through our collaborative work over the semester, we are going to work to “break the Nerd Loop” as Randy Olson puts it, and find resonance with everyday people.

Nowadays, these undergraduate students are critical thinkers who have been born into a world where anthropogenic climate change has always been an issue discussed and debated in the public arena. These are
also future leaders who have generally inherited 3 percent greenhouse gas emissions increases/year since they were in elementary school. So they’re primed to explore novel communications on climate change.

Beth and I hope we’ll inspire students to think about creative and engaging ways to translate these complex issues for the public citizenry. These ways can then lead to more sustained and long-lasting successes with a variety of vexing 21st century challenges.

Generally all my courses are ‘open source’ so that people can download the syllabus and access most readings as they wish. You can see my other Colorado courses here if you’d like a peek.

Last week, I wrote about the new online climate science course taught by David Archer at the University of Chicago.

Soon I’ll write here on an innovative class at Pace University in which faculty member Claudia Mausner staged a fascinating debate among student teams adopting the climate stances of the three main sectors of American society discerned through the Climate Change and the American Mind project at Yale University: “alarmed or concerned,” “cautious or disengaged,” “doubtful or dismissive.”

I sat in on the debate, which looked remarkably like the debate that takes place in the comment stream here every time I write on global warming…