Engaging Teachers in Professional Development For Teaching About Climate Change

• In Event: Reading and Writing about Climate Change: Developing Teachers’ Literacies in/for a Warming World

Abstract

As climate change denialism becomes increasingly prevalent, there is a need for sustained, inquiry-driven, and place-based professional development to help teachers learn to develop critical pedagogical methods for teaching about climate change.
This report summarizes the experiences and shifts in practice of participants from Human/Nature: An Exploration of Place, Stories, and Climate Futurism, a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer Institute held in 2023 for 25 U.S. educators, primarily middle and high school English Language Arts teachers. Previous research has documented how similar professional development programs serve to strengthen teachers’ self-efficacy in engaging in effective instruction, thereby improving student learning (Morris et al., 2016; Olawumi & Mavuso, 2024; Raath & Hay, 2016).
A key theoretical focus of the Institute involved instruction based on the value of re-storying status quo “stories to live by” for imagining alternative futures for enacting sustainability practices (Damico et al., 2020). During the first week of the Institute at Sonoma State University, participants engaged in activities related to applying this framework for teaching about climate fiction, writing, role-play, and digital media.
As a primary text for the Institute, participants responded to Parable of the Sower (Butler, 2000) by engaging in creative response activities that drew on the main character’s “Earthseed” journal. They also engaged in critical media activities in response to the novel Feed (Anderson, 2012) to discuss the limitations of how the use of digital technology and advertising promotes consumption. Teachers learned to apply Literacy Unbound methods (Gordon et al., 2015), utilizing hands-on activities with artifacts or engaging in embodied experiences of scenes from the books.
For the second week, participants engaged in field trips to local forests, rivers, and oceans to consider ways for preserving ecosystems, leading to developing place-based activities based “reading the landscape” of changes in local environments due to climate change (Bascopé et al., 2019; Gleeson & Morrissey, 2024; Shrestha et al., 2025), for example, changes in a redwood forest.
At the end of the Institute, participants generated Curricular Action Plans for implementing perspectives and methods acquired from the Institute based on a metadiscursive curriculum development framework (Burruel Stone & Baratta, 2023).
Participants completed a final survey, rating the value of their participation and providing specific descriptions of their experience. Participants consistently rated their participation as positive, noting the value of engaging in a highly concentrated professional development program. One of the additional co-authors of our report described engaging her students in journal writing in response to The Parable of the Sower (Butler, 2000), while the other co-author had her students respond to The Hunger Games (Collins, 2008) about the issues of coal mining in their region and its impact on emissions.
This project suggests that “one and done” professional development sessions or even incremental changes to curriculum will not be enough to affect teachers’ behaviors about teaching climate change in our current era. Instead, we must embrace sustained, immersive, inquiry-driven, and place-based learning.

Authors

• Fawn E. Canady, Southern Oregon University

• Richard W. Beach, University of Minnesota

• Troy W. Hicks, Central Michigan University