Can we thrive in a dangerous warming world? Systems thinking imagines hope in the classroom

• In Event: 20461 - Teaching and Learning Symposium Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 7: Teaching Social Engagement, Teaching Groups

Abstract

This generation of college students, unlike any generation before it, faces the real possibility of civilizational collapse. We older generations bear the responsibility for this calamity. Because of our culpability in the making of the global climate crisis, we are morally bound to do all we can to support our students' flourishing in this dangerous world. Indeed, it is our moral duty to cultivate hope. This does not mean that we obfuscate reality. On the contrary, care for our students means that we must help them to confront the world as it is and provide them the intellectual resources to imagine a world in balance. I discuss how I integrate reality and hope in an upper-division sociology and environmental studies course titled “Systems Thinking for a World Out of Balance.” The course text is Donella H. Meadows’ Thinking in Systems, A Primer, which provides the conceptual framework to analyze three distinct but interrelated global systems: the COVID-19 pandemic, industrial agriculture, and the climate crisis. Meadows is a scientist par excellence, but her primer is also a meditation on human weakness and the pinched, unimaginative perspectives that consistently lead to system malfunction and collapse. Working collaboratively in small groups all semester, the students analyze these unbalanced and inequitable global systems in depth but with a goal towards completing an investigative project about an alternative system of their choice that works for the benefit of all its parts: humans, non-humans, and the larger ecosystem. I show how systems thinking can open students’ eyes to the dangers around us, while simultaneously providing them with an analytical toolbox and hopeful case studies to imagine real alternatives. I also assess this pedagogical approach and consider how to apply it in other courses.

Author

• Rebecca L. Overmyer-Velazquez, Whittier College