Students and Changing Climates: Teaching Climate Anxiety in Environmental Studies and Environmental History

• In Event: Changing Climates–Past, Present and Future

Abstract

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Kansas. Since the advent of the Covid 19 pandemic, I have noticed an increase in anxiety among my students concerning the issue of climate change. The evidence for this change is both anecdotal and documented – it comes from both informal conversations with students inside and outside of the classroom, but it also comes from student evaluations, which have brought up the topic of climate anxiety increasingly over the past three years. To help them engage with this important issue, I assigned Sarah Jaquette Ray’s book A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety in my entry-level Global Environment course in the spring of 2023. The book is designed to help students learn how to cope emotionally and intellectually with the effects of climate change while also introducing them to concepts as climate justice and climate activism. I designed the class’s final project around their reading of the book, but the results were more mixed than I anticipated. Many students found hope in the book’s messages about combating burnout and practicing meaningful self-care, but other students indicated that the book made them more anxious about climate change, not less, and forced them to interrogate whether they are taking the issue seriously enough. In this paper (for a panel or round table), I would like to share my thoughts and experiences working with college students to help them grapple with a climate-changed world. My goal is to spark a conversation about which pedagogical strategies work when it comes to teaching climate anxiety, and which do not, so that teachers of environmental history and environmental studies can help students as they encounter an uncertain future.

Author

• Alex Boynton, University of Kansas