This Teachers' Day, Prepare Students For Their Climate-Changed Futures

It is vital for educators to talk about climate action in their circle of influence – the classroom.

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For an educator there is no bigger satisfaction than seeing their students flourish, using the understanding, capacities, and skills they helped build. But what if we tell you – what we are teaching them in our classrooms is no longer enough to secure their futures?

In the coming years, children will increasingly be impacted by worsening air, rampant spread of diseases, school closures due to increasing heat and disasters due to anthropogenic climate change.

But our education system – at curriculum, pedagogical, and administrative levels – is yet to respond to this.

While the wheels of policy remain static in this regard, it is important and potentially impactful for educators to talk about climate action in their circle of influence – the classroom.

Begin by Acknowledging Their Right

This can start with educators first acknowledging that children have a right to be prepared to meet the climate crisis.

Dr Yasmin Ali Haque, UNICEF India Representative, has said that “climate change is a child rights crisis”.

The UNICEF’s Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI), introduced in the year 2021, records clear evidence of the adverse impact of climate change on millions of children in South Asia.

One of the key recommendations in the CCRI report, therefore, is providing a robust climate education.

Clearly, we no longer have the luxury or the need to debate if climate change should be talked about in every classroom.

What Should This Education Entail?

The climate crisis will change our lives in many ways.

To secure children’s futures we will have to allow the climate crisis to also change the 'what' and 'how' of teaching, and not merely focus on providing reams of information that is either overlooked or anxiety-inducing.

Currently, much of what and how children are made to learn is not only obsolete for their future but is arguably the reason the planet is in the state it is today.

Values of competition and the unquestioned pursuit of individual success that steamroll the instinct for empathy, intuition, and connection, are currently at the core of educating children. And we wonder why they cannot be guardians of the planet!

Education will have to be open to a radical reimagining if it must continue to be considered a powerful means for the flourishing of societies which, of course, will need a flourishing planet.

This would need us to shift out of its predominantly instrumental approach i.e. creating and making efficient the unquestioned pursuit of individual success, and instead, embrace a more transformative approach.

As educators embarking on being facilitators of learning about climate change, we will have to,

• Reshape our own capacities.

• Know how to turn anxiety and helplessness into useful optimism and agency.

• Learn how to facilitate the development of systems thinking.

• Learn to support the shifting sands that come with creativity and innovativeness developed by our students.

Didactic methods, that are best suited for the pursuit of individual success, will no longer work to prepare children for their climate-changed futures.

As educators we will, therefore, need to have unorthodox and transformative learning experiences ourselves to shake off our own entrenched ways of learning and teaching.

How Do We Reshape Our Learning?

As educators, we will need to cross disciplinary boundaries to entertain interdisciplinary teaching.

The climate crisis does not present issues within strict disciplinary boundaries i.e. as a purely Math, Biology or Economics problem. To truly prepare our students for the complexity of the climate crisis we will have to become comfortable with interdisciplinarity.

Concomitant with this will be the use of different pedagogies. We will need to attend or watch talks, workshops, and conferences and try out various pedagogical methods (found through creative and interdisciplinary lessons found online).

Another point regarding disciplinary teaching is that we will need to understand that knowing ‘Climate Science’ alone will be insufficient for climate action.

We can no longer ignore the role of social structures, economic paradigms, and in turn their roles in political will, in the climate crisis.

A hope-instilling education for climate action will mean helping children and youth see that as a future electorate, they can demand structural and paradigm transformations, in their communities, informed by climate science.

While global impacts of climate change are important to understand, the most impactful shifts will be due to localised solutions. As educators, we will have to take notice and understand climate change phenomena in our geographies and seek out stories of mitigation, adaptation, and resilience and bring them into our classrooms in developmentally appropriate ways.

Teaching is often experienced as an isolating experience and many times, a never-ending job. With climate education being a new interdisciplinary, the additional workload will initially be daunting, but this is where communities and networks become crucial.

These would be places for dialogue, co-creation, sharing, reflection on teaching practices and much needed holding spaces for educators.

This Teacher’s Day, let us take that next step together and make the brave foray into teaching about a crisis that affects us as much as our students.

(Pallavi Phatak is the Head of the Climate and Education programme at Asar Social Impact Advisors Pvt Ltd. She is an educationist with over 18 years of experience spanning teaching, curriculum & pedagogy development, teacher education, school improvement, and education research. She leads strategy at the Climate Educators Network. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)