Educators have varied takes on tackling issue
Sign says: “If you don’t act like adults, we will.”
A Grade 12 student exuded frustration, incredulity and passion in turn as she addressed the largest ever crowd at a Regina climate strike on Sept. 27. Fuelling those emotions were her teachers’ inaction when told of the strike.
“Not one teacher joined us and told us that climate change is real, that this is important,” said the young woman, who didn’t give her name.
“My science teachers denied,” she continued.
When Jesse Bazzul heard her, he found her words “really disheartening.”
An associate professor in science education at the University of Regina, “I was really sort of disappointed,” he said. In science education, “teachers need to be socially and politically and environmentally engaged.”
“In school, they teach us recycle, and it’s better to bike than drive,” said Sydney Chadwick, a first-year U of R student who graduated from high school in June.
“But they don’t really teach us how intense the climate is at this moment, and how important it really is. It’s not just about pollution. It’s about so much more.”
Some people believe these students are being indoctrinated by their teachers, or their parents, or “the liberal left,” or that they ’re striking because they want a couple hours off school.
But “in the eight years I’ve been at school, we’ve talked very little about climate change,” said Ada Dechene, a 13-year-old Grade 8 student who has helped organize the Regina climate strikes. “And the only way to learn about climate change is mostly on your own.”
The latest, on Nov. 29, coincided with a school holiday for Melfort student Saj Starcevich.
“And also,” the 13-year-old added, “I’m not just doing this because somebody told me to . ... It’s my future and I actually care.”
Stella Sale, 13, shared that sentiment: She protests “because we don’t want the world to be a pile of trash.”
Not all students are so proactive, and not all teachers deny climate lessons. At Balfour Collegiate, Aysha Yaqoob has tackled the subject in her Grade 10 English class — climate change fits into two units of the curriculum, “equity and ethics,” and “the world around us and within us.”
She has led class discussions on climate change after watching films, reading articles and hosting guest speakers.
“A lot of our conversations go around, ‘OK, well, how can you make a change without waiting until you’re 18, or doing something that gets you in front of the people who make the decisions?’”
Yaqoob said her students have shown an interest: The subject is relevant to them, unlike “if I just spent the entire year reading poems from, like, the 16th century.”
Karen Mciver has done similar things with her science students at Winston Knoll Collegiate, encouraging them to explore ways of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and why it matters.
Specifically, their ideas have included giving away bus passes at school to discourage driving, and proposing regulations for solar panels on any new buildings.
This helps alleviate climate anxiety, said Mciver, when anxiety and mental illness are already so prevalent among students.
“What kids are often saying is they just feel like giving up and that we should move to a different planet,” Mciver said. “And that’s really sad to me that, for a lot of youth, they aren’t seeing that there is a positive ending.”
Yaqoob agreed she has seen “the panic set in” during lessons.
Mciver tries to frame climate-change education as an opportunity for innovation and changing lifestyles. “It doesn’t have to be all punitive and negative.”
Her students sometimes bring opinions to class, but “we try to stick to the science behind climate change and climate patterns.”
Yaqoob said her purpose is to
“present (students) with the facts,” too. For example, they explore various governments’ policies on energy sources and emissions, and “then they make that comparison themselves.
“I’m always careful that I’m not forcing any of my opinions down any of their throats,” Yaqoob said. “But I think a lot of parents forget that when kids start realizing that it’s their future that’s at stake, that they actually start to care.”
At the U of R, the education faculty is in the process of changing course materials, to empower teachers to address environmental issues in non-science courses, Bazzul said.
“Sometimes we isolate things like dealing with environmental issues or climate change separately from mainstream teacher education. So you don’t learn about climate change in your general education courses; you learn about it in your environmental education course,” said Bazzul.
He believes science teachers should be socially, politically and environmentally engaged.
At the university level, biology professor Britt Hall is engaged.
She speaks out — at climate rallies, at public events, in media — because “we need the public to know about science so that we can make good decision making.
“And in order to empower our governments to do that,” added Hall, “we need to make sure that the public agrees with that as well. And the best way to do that is to educate them.”
In Thursday’s Leader-post, Climate Conundrum Part 5: Empathy seems absent when climate change is brought up. Why are people so inclined to attack, especially on social media?