Teaching Climate Change as a Connective Discipline (Poster 3)

• In Event: Connective and Productive Disciplinary Engagement: Key Concepts, Applications, Developments, and New Directions

Abstract

In this paper I describe climate change teaching and learning designed and analyzed with the CPDE framework (Agarwal & Sengupta-Irving, 2019) and explore climate change as an inherently connective discipline, that is, connected to students’ identities, histories, cultures, communities, and futures, and to the power dynamics that shape their interactions with the climate crisis. I discuss how the CPDE framework supported expanding normative perceptions of what belongs in secondary science classrooms and structuring student engagement at the intersection of the scientific and sociopolitical dimensions of climate change. Data are drawn from a participatory design research study that took place in a 10th grade chemistry class serving Black and Latinx youth in a Title 1 school in a large urban community. I draw on design artifacts, classroom observations from remote instruction, and classroom work to trace the development of student ideas through their engagement. For the analysis of design, I present data on how my teacher-partner and I conceptualized climate change as connective to help students grapple with the biophysical, political, and justice connections of climate change in their community. I will share how CPDE helped us to confront power inequities in how and by whom climate change is caused and experienced. For the analysis of engagement, I present findings on an interaction in which students grappled with solar panels as a mitigation strategy. In these interactions, I show how the four principles of CPDE - PDE principles (Engle & Conant, 2002) reimagined to include historicity and identity, and epistemic diversity – make visible student sensemaking that aligned with a critical and authentic debate about solar panel policy. For problematizing and authority, I show how students surfaced sociopolitical uncertainties of climate change mitigation in their community to reject apolitical, technocentric views promoted in the Next Generation Science Standards. For accountability and resources, I show how centering the youths’ identities and experiences supported students in drawing on their critical awareness of social issues as valuable sensemaking resources. As students explained the causes, consequences, and solutions to climate change in their community, they claimed that access to solar panels is inequitable and argued for policies to remediate these inequities to allow them, and other low-income renters, to participate in reducing their carbon footprint by installing solar panels on their roofs. I contribute to critical work in STEM education by showing how CPDE thickens “the intellectual substrate in which disciplinary curiosities and uncertainties can find root” (p.13). In this study, student engagement with the climate crisis took root in youths’ everyday local experiences, their critical awareness of social issues, and their imagined future, and that disciplinary curiosity blossomed into calls for collective sociopolitical action. Designing and studying climate change teaching and learning as connective in secondary science supports aligning instruction with how climate change is experienced in the world – as a sociopolitical crisis– and helps imagine what justice-oriented science education can look and feel in schools.

Author

• Heather F. Clark, California State University - Dominguez Hills