Teaching Climate by Touching Soil: Reframing Environmental Learning through Local Contexts

• In Event: Virtual Roundtable Session 3
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Roundtable Discussion on Barriers and Potentials in Using Social-Emotional Learning Towards Climate Justice: A View from South Asia

Proposal

As climate change education becomes more prominent globally, there remains a significant disconnect between the way it is framed in curricula and how children, particularly those in low-resource settings, experience it. Climate education is often influenced heavily by abstract global concepts such as rising temperatures, sea level rise, carbon footprints that may be scientifically sound but remain emotionally and experientially distant from the learners’ lives. This practice-based presentation argues that for children to truly understand and respond to environmental crises, education must begin not with the global, but with the ground beneath their feet.
Drawing from field experiences in Hamari Duniya, a hands-on environmental education program for children in grades 6 to 8 run by Pratham Education Foundation, this presentation explores how a place-based, observation-driven approach can reframe climate education to be more relevant, empowering, and rooted in socio-emotional development.
Hamari Duniya enables children in rural and urban India to engage with environmental themes like water, land, and sky, through real-world inquiry, data collection, storytelling, and community-based projects. Instead of beginning with the ozone layer or global temperature graphs, children start by asking: Why is our hand pump dry this week? What’s in the air I breathe on my way to school? What happens to the trash we throw out every day? By interacting with their immediate environment, conducting water quality surveys, mapping local trees, or tracking daily weather; children begin to see environmental change before they are taught to name it.
This local-first approach is not just pedagogically effective; it also catalyzes socio-emotional learning (SEL). When children are encouraged to observe, reflect, and act on issues affecting their own communities, they develop empathy, agency, critical thinking, and collaborative problem-solving—all foundational SEL skills and essential for engaging meaningfully with climate justice. Research has increasingly shown the value of combining SEL with climate education to build lifelong resilience and collective responsibility (UNESCO, 2021; CASEL, 2022).
The presentation will examine stories and data from Hamari Duniya’s implementation across 13 states in India, involving over 60,000 children through school- and community-based models. It will highlight how locally grounded environmental activities not only strengthened textbook learning in science and social studies (as per NCERT standards) but also led to visible shifts in children’s attitudes toward sustainability and community engagement.
Key questions include:
What happens when children “see” climate change before they “hear” about it?
How do local observations help children connect emotionally to global challenges?
Can climate education serve as a bridge between knowledge and citizenship?
This presentation challenges the dominant top-down model of climate education by centering the child’s immediate environment as the starting point for learning. It reframes environmental education not as a transfer of global facts, but as a process of nurturing local awareness, emotional connection, and community-rooted action. In doing so, it positions place-based learning as a powerful lever for climate justice; grounded in relevance, driven by agency, and shaped by those most impacted.

Author

• Viplow Shivhare, Pratham Education Foundation