Teacher Education for Local Solutions Through Global Education

• In Event: Teacher Education for Transdisciplinary Climate Change Education

Abstract

Preparing students to address the environmental and societal problems that our changing climate will create requires educating students to engage in environmental stewardship and advocacy. Indeed, many U.S. states have adopted content standards for grades K-12 that include learning about global climate change and have passed legislation requiring or encouraging local schools to integrate environmental or climate literacy into instruction. Yet, not nearly enough is being done in K-12 classrooms to help students develop into climate stewards. Research on best practices for student learning identifies implementing school or community projects as well as encouraging critical thinking skills and an understanding of the complex interconnectedness of social, economic, and environmental factors in climate change education as effective interventions (Monroe et al., 2019; Waldron et al., 2019). As such, teacher education programs and professional development need to not only include the science of climate change but also provide teachers with strategies to use to help students connect with nature, identify local social and environmental problems related to global sustainability, and ideate and implement possible solutions.

In our teacher education courses and professional development projects, we frame work through the goals of sustainable development, which requires consideration of interacting environmental and societal issues, from climate change, pollution and the overuse of resources, to poverty, to racial and gender inequities (UNESCO, 2017, 2020). In our presentation, we will describe examples from preservice elementary school teacher education, preservice secondary education, and from professional development for K-12 teachers. Here we describe the professional development program.

To support practicing K-12 teachers in engaging their students in solutions-focused projects related to climate change, we offer two types of professional development programs. One program is implemented over five months during the school year and includes bi-monthly virtual meetings of teachers working in school-based teams and check-ins across schools in the alternating months. The second type of professional development program is a multi-day summer institute for K-12 teachers with follow ups during the subsequent school year. Both professional development programs use the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Global Competence Framework (PISA, 2018) to support interdisciplinary thinking with a critical lens and are designed to support teachers in implementing school or community projects alongside their students. Participants have ranged from pre-K school teams whose TK students implemented school composting programs to high school teams from multiple disciplines who worked together to engage students in both culinary science and woodshop courses to create a school garden that resulted in food served in the school cafeteria.

We advocate engaging K-12 students in climate change education grounded in observing their local place and developing solutions to local problems that connect to global issues. Implementing such opportunities is not easy. Like the problems related to climate change, those related to climate change education are complex and require both teacher educators and teachers to engage in new types of instruction. The transformation of teacher education and professional development—is desperately needed and requires working across disciplines and grade levels, with community partners.

Authors

• Danielle B. Harlow, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Julie Bianchini, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Devon Azzam, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Karin Lohwasser, University of California - Santa Barbara