How Community Volunteers Support Action-Oriented Climate Education in Elementary Classrooms (Poster 7)

• In Event: Climate Teacher Education as Spaces for Holding Climate Precarity, Hope, Community, and Youths’ Flourishing Futures

Abstract

Purpose
Climate change is intricately interdisciplinary and linked to social justice issues. Teachers need support to integrate climate change into existing curricula and engage students in climate action. Teachers, students, and community members must collaborate to be agents of change. This project examines how classroom volunteers support elementary teachers’ and students’ agency as changemakers for climate justice.

Framework
Theories of human agency frame how people build collective capacity to respond to problematic situations (Biesta & Tedder, 2007). Collective agency has bearing on how people act in response to seemingly immovable climate change problems and how teachers engage in climate education amid calcified curricular structures (Priestly, Edwards, Priestley, & Miller, 2012). Findings from this case study suggest that expertise, activity, and responsibility are shared and distributed among educators collectively rather than individually for climate change education in schools.

Mode of Inquiry
This qualitative case study employs ethnographic methods to document how collaboration unfolded between classroom volunteers, elementary teachers, and students during a series of three climate education units across three different school sites. Researchers generated field notes detailing the complex work of planning, enacting, and assessing/adjusting climate change education shared between volunteers and elementary classroom teachers. Photo documentation captured moments in teachers’ and volunteers’ joint work that could be described more elaborately and reflectively later in memos. Finally, interviews with volunteers provided an additional layer of perspective about the roles they played.

Findings
Volunteers provided three key contributions to action-oriented climate change education that otherwise might have been out of reach for classroom teachers working independently. First, volunteers lowered the initial energy needed to overcome the inertia inherent in the concretized curricula and schedules of schooling. Volunteers, all of whom are retired elementary educators, rallied relationships with school leaders to develop and pitch supplementary curricula that could complement existing curricula and add to school programming in libraries, classrooms, and field trips enabling climate change education to get off the ground.

Second, volunteers networked extensively and generated out-of-school experiences vital for impactful climate education. Cultivating relationships with Indigenous climate activists, local governance agencies, and climate-related industries created field trip opportunities and sparked engagement in local climate action requiring substantial coordination.

Finally, volunteers sustained and expanded efforts beyond the initial design of the instructional unit. Teachable moments arose in the middle of each unit requiring quick re-designs which might have been too taxing on top of teachers’ already-filled plates. Similarly, civic engagement with local governance decisions required spur-of-the-moment organizing to speak with city councils and other government actors. Coordinators’ continuous communication with parents, school administrators, and local media further contributed to the ability to sustain and expand the collective agency for climate change education and action in all three sites.

Scholarly Significance
Findings push us to consider how teachers can be better supported to engage in labor-intensive action-oriented climate change education. This study contributes to theory-building about the concept of collective agency both for climate change education efforts in classrooms and for climate action in communities.

Authors

• Melissa Braaten, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Tiffany Boyd, Classrooms For Climate Action

• Jessica R. Bean, University of California - Berkeley