Educating Students and Ourselves in a Changing Climate

For Laura Schifter, Ed.M.’07, Ed.D.’14, the world’s problem with climate change once seemed distant and remote.

“My assumptions were always that it was a far-off problem or that it was something that people working in the environment could handle. At the time I thought it was not something critical to education because in education we face so many issues and so many problems,” she says.

Schifter’s assumptions changed in 2018 when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a major report that laid out the alarming consequences of our planet warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) or even higher, above preindustrial levels, and called for urgent action to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Schifter still vividly remembers the day she first heard about the report. Her three daughters had the day off from school and Schifter was playing with them in the basement when she received “news alert after news alert,” about it, she recalls. “The headlines were saying we had a decade left to address climate change to avoid the most devastating impacts, and it was in that moment I realized that this was actually an issue that was going to shape my children's lives, as well as all children's lives, and that I had to figure out something I could do.”

Schifter quickly set out to learn as much as she could about our world’s changing climate. One of her big discoveries was seeing how the education sector that she had devoted her career to — as an elementary school teacher, as someone who had worked in education policy, and as a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education — could help in many ways including reducing its large carbon footprint and preparing students for success.

Schifter, who is currently a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute where she leads the This Is Planet Ed initiative, is the co-author, with Jonathan Klein, of a new Harvard Education Press title: Students, Schools, and Our Climate Moment — Acting Now to Secure Our Future. She recently sat down to discuss what she believes climate action should look like in the K–12 space.

In your book, you say that we’ve just scratched the surface of education's role in addressing climate change, and that education has a unique role to play in developing climate solutions. Where do you think the greatest potential lies?

I think the greatest potential lies in what educators do best, which is teaching and learning. When we think about this issue, when people talk about solutions to climate change, they talk about things like renewable energy, they talk about sustainable manufacturing, they talk about all these different things, but they frequently ignore the one most important thing that is needed to drive all of these solutions which is people, and ultimately we need to build the capacity of people to do this work. That's where education comes in. Educators need to realize that it's a part of our responsibility right now to prepare people for success in a changing climate and start doing that more robustly.

You highlight surveys showing that only 14% of educators in the United States feel “very prepared” to teach about climate change and that educators in Brazil, Canada, France, and India are three times as likely to say that they feel supported to teach about climate change, compared to educators in the United States. What are the barriers that educators face here?

I think one important thing to realize is the vast majority of educators probably didn't have the opportunity to learn about climate change themselves. We need to create space and resources to help educators learn about the issues, learn about how it intersects with the area that they teach, and provide additional support for educators to figure out how to integrate it into the curriculum and not make it this additional thing that they have to cover. It can naturally fit into the work that they do and intersect with what they're already teaching. We should also create community so that they know that they're not alone in doing this work.

When we think about climate change, the problems can seem far away. You encourage educators to localize the issue for children and young people. Why is that important?

I think one of the things that's critical in thinking about this issue is the notion of distance on climate, whether it's distance in time, and we think of it as a faraway problem, or distance in space, and we think that it's an issue impacting others, but not me, that's prevented action. It allows us to distance ourselves from the reality that we are all facing. It’s really important to localize climate change, to help young people understand the realities of the world that they're living in. This isn't just something impacting polar bears’ habitats, it's impacting our habitats too, and that might mean that you can't have soccer practice at noon on a day in the summer because it's too hot. That might mean that our schools are closing for heat days more often than snow days. It might mean that you had to relocate to a different school, like in Los Angeles after the wildfires severely damaged and destroyed schools across that community. So, it's important to localize it, to make it more tangible for people and see how it's actually intersecting with their daily lives. It can help to empower people to know what they can do to advance solutions locally. Whether it's pushing your school to go solar or whether it's creating a community garden, or whether it's starting a composting initiative, these are all things that can create agency for young people and help them know how they can make a real difference in their communities.

How can educators help kids to work towards solutions when they see local problems that can sometimes feel overwhelming, such as the threat of sea-level rise to our coastal areas here in Massachusetts?

There’s a young person featured in the book, Maya, who grew up in Charleston and the idea of sea-level rise in Charleston, South Carolina, is really important. One of the things that she said to me was that she wished more adults had spoken to her about the issues, even if they didn’t have all the answers. It would have been OK to say, “we don't know all the answers right now, but we're going to work towards figuring out the right solutions.” You can't wait to have all the answers to talk to kids about these issues, and the way to empower them is opening up the discussion with a solutions-oriented mind, and allow for innovation, allow for discussion, and talk about the different tradeoffs of the solutions that are out there. We need to have a base-level of foundational knowledge that we all understand and then get people to work on this together.

In recent years, we’ve seen many schools cut back on recess time, but you say that getting kids outside to play in rural, suburban, and urban school settings is essential. Why is it so important for this work?

It's important to get outside to remind ourselves of our connection to nature. We are a part of nature, and we depend on our climate to do the things that we love to do, and  that continued connection with nature is an important reminder for ourselves, it's an important thing for kids, to know and appreciate — and that's whether you live in an urban area or a rural area, or a suburban area. Continuing to remind ourselves that we are a part of this bigger world, and we are deeply connected to it, is critical to doing any of this work.

What can educators do to help kids develop the literacy and critical thinking skills they need to be able to question any misinformation about climate change that they may see in the media or in social media?

Sometimes people perceive climate change as so big that it's hard to concisely talk about what it is. But it’s critical for educators to focus on climate basics. We’ve worked with The Nature Conservancy and their chief climate scientist, Katharine Hayhoe, to take what climate scientists say all adults need to know about climate change, and we've worked to “kidify” those messages. The first thing to combat misinformation is to get really clear on the basics and making sure adults understand the climate basics. For us it's: Earth is our home. It’s getting hotter because of us humans. Rising temperatures are caused by things like burning fossil fuels for electricity, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and buildings. The climate is changing now, and that harms us, but together we can advance the solutions we need for a brighter future. Having this clear understanding of what climate change is, is one of the most important things to combat misinformation.

In our current political times, what motivates you to keep going when you see very limited support at the federal level for addressing environmental issues?

Things might be in flux at the federal level, but it’s important to remember the power that states, local school districts, and even schools can have. What motivates me to keep going is seeing the actions that people are taking all across the country. I just attended a climate summit for Prince George's County Public Schools in Maryland. Over 300 high school students spent the day learning about climate jobs and engaging in conversations about solutions. In the next room, district leaders worked together to discuss implementation of their climate action plan and share their learnings with other district leaders in the state. Committed people working across the country right now give me hope. The more that we're able to have examples of action, the more conversations that we're able to have in communities all across this country, parent to parent, teacher to teacher, about why this is important for us to address, the more that we're going to enable people to act. I hope with this book, we're able to show that individuals all across this country made a difference by starting a conversation with other people in their community and inspire more people to start their own conversations, too, regardless of what's going on all around us.