Integrating Climate Change in Any Course
Brief Overview
Climate change has long been a subject primarily taught in the earth sciences and associated natural science disciplines. Contributors to the IPCC assessment reports, however, point to the urgency and complexity of climate change and its impacts as the largest human and environmental crisis of our time. This means that social sciences, education, humanities, fine arts, health sciences, business, aviation, and engineering instructors can also offer critical guidance to students on this topic to prepare them to address the interconnected, interdisciplinary challenges this “wicked problem”[1] presents. As David Orr, an environmental education and literacy scholar, observed:
First, all education is environmental education. By what is included or excluded we teach students that they are part of or apart from the natural world. To teach economics, for example, without reference to the laws of thermodynamics or those of ecology is to teach a fundamentally important ecological lesson: that physics and ecology have nothing to do with the economy. That just happens to be dead wrong. The same is true throughout all of the curriculum.[2]
What Topics Does Climate Change Engage?
Literacy in the basics of climate science as well as knowledge of effective framing and communication strategies can be valuable to students in courses across the disciplines.
Beyond the core focus on science and climate mitigation, though, the scope of lessons and modules on climate change can range widely in most disciplines, including the following interdisciplinary areas addressed in the resources on this site:
- climate adaptation
- climate justice
- coping with climate anxiety and grief
- climate communication and framing
- collective and individual climate action and solutions
How to Integrate Climate Change
The urgent need to involve all disciplines in addressing climate change gives rise to the question:
What teaching methods can instructors across diverse disciplines use to begin engaging students meaningfully in the topic of climate change?
The primary goal of this web resource is to provide instructors from across the disciplines with a guide to integrating or revising their coverage of climate change in their courses. A highly accessible open education resources (OER) website organized into K-12, Higher Education, and Content Provider sections is the OER Commons Climate Education Hub. Once you select subtopics in one of these sections of the website, you can filter your search by educational level, subject area, material type, media format, and so on. Below is a list of approaches arranged in order from more minimalist to more comprehensive inclusion of climate change, so that you can identify which approach(es) to integrating these resources best fits your course development or redesign goals.
1. Briefly mention climate change (in person or online):
Mentioning climate change as a subject relevant to course content can help to normalize it as a topic for students to engage with, no matter the discipline. It can be as simple as finding a news story on climate change and talking about it at the beginning of class – or sharing a link to the story and introducing it in the “News” section of your E-learning course.
2. Integrate relevant climate change materials into course content:
Engaging students in telling and listening to climate stories can better situate and make more tangible the impacts of climate change in their lives and in the lives of others living around the world. Showing a brief video can raise student awareness of the relevance of climate change to the course content. This is an approach you could also try in #3 below, integrating a climate story into a class discussion or activity.
3. Insert a short activity/exercise/lab on climate change into a module:
The OER Commons resource above offers numerous easy ways to include an activity in a variety of disciplines. This can be done with a mini-lecture on a specific issue within climate change being discussed (e.g., climate communication) before students work to complete an activity or lab that you create or borrow – such as the journalism exercise, “Chew on This.”
4. Adopt/Adapt OER lectures, labs and/or assignments OR invite a guest lecturer:
For a slightly deeper dive into climate-focused content, there are a variety of ready-to-use lectures and activities. For example, in a psychology or interdisciplinary health course, one could adapt the resource-driven assignment, “The Food We Eat Can Have a Positive Impact on Climate Justice.” More interactive lessons, including simulators, can be found at Climate Interactive. Outside scholarly contacts or members of the WMU Climate Change Working Group’s Speaker’s Bureau can provide expert guest lectures from across the disciplines.
5. Adopt/Adapt a pre-made OER module or module segment:
This option works well if you have a module in a course that you want to replace or one that you are thinking of shifting more toward a climate change focus. Although the OER Commons Climate Education Hub is a comprehensive search tool, InTeGrate and CLEAN also offer accessible, interdisciplinary resource collections.
6. Construct your own lesson on climate change:
When creating content, you can make use of a wide range of supporting resources. Finding a colleague to serve as a mentor in this process, looking through example OER climate education lessons, and seeking out climate literacy trainings are great ways to facilitate this process. Here are a few sites to consult:
7. Design a climate-focused module(s):
The process for this approach involves using a combination of the resources and guidance found in options 5 and 6 above. Self-paced, short courses like these are also available for building content literacy: CARE Climate and Resilience Academy and the UN Climate Change Learning Partnership.
8. Integrate climate change holistically across modules in your course:
This method works well if you want to include climate change in a course in a more dispersed manner with relevant climate change activities or lessons in multiple modules. For example, this may involve analyzing climate data using different methods, or including a selection of readings on climate fiction, or “Cli-Fi,” to discuss at different points in a course.
9. Design your own climate-focused course:
If you have experience with teaching climate change (science, justice, adaptation, and so on) or are interested in shifting your focus toward this topic in a new course, then you might want to try this approach. A helpful way to begin this process is to search for syllabi, and the Climate Solutions Lab’s “Syllabus Bank” offers a variety of humanities and social sciences examples.
References
- Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. (2016, June 4). What are Wicked Problems?. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/wicked-problems.
- Orr, David. (1991). “What Is Education For? Six myths about the foundations of modern education, and six new principles to replace them.” The Learning Revolution (IC#27), Winter, p. 52. Retrieve from: https://www.context.org/iclib/ic27/orr/.