Anthropocentric climate change is a defining issue of the twenty-first century. Considering the severity of the effects, a more appropriate term may be climate crisis. Further, the intensity of the climate crisis, whether it is more frequent natural catastrophes or record-setting heat, puts societies and ecosystems at risk. Even classrooms and students must endure rising temperatures within schools. Yet educators also play an inimitable role in preparing students for a world living in a climate crisis. This requires extensive work to promote understanding and work toward solutions.
Over the past twenty years, climate change education has evolved from a topic covered primarily in science classes to a subject covered in all content areas. In social studies, educators focus on the intersection between the climate crisis and issues such as justice, migration, and economics. Yet one of the primary methods for getting people to care about climate change is often missing from social studies curricula. The role of place is usually left unaccounted for in social studies despite place playing an important role in changing individuals’ mindsets about climate change. In addition, the voices that need to be heard most, including those living in locations most susceptible to climate change, are often marginalized.
This qualitative study explores how educators in a vulnerable locale account for place when teaching climate change by asking the following question: How/where do social science educators in vulnerable locales form a sense of their place, and in what ways is that sense of place used accounted for when teaching climate change? The sub-questions for this study include: What ecological and cultural experiences and learning inform conceptions of place? How do teachers’ conceptualizations of climate change engage with local and global discourses of land, people, and society? How do teaching contexts (such as place-based education or predominant native schools) create variation across these research questions? This study used various methods, including semi-structured interviews, sensory ethnography, and visual elicitation, to understand how teachers incorporated place into their teaching and how different perspectives of place can inform a more holistic approach to teaching climate change. The study took place in Hawai‘i, a state and former sovereign kingdom with one of the most unique ecosystems in the world. It is a Pacific Island that faces unique challenges from climate change. Moreover, Hawai‘i has a strong understanding of the importance of place that is present through its Indigenous roots and its educational systems.
The findings suggest that through a network of embedded and embodied knowledge, participants developed a relationship with land that affected not only who they were as individuals but also how they taught climate change.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/rx2a-z664 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Donnelly, Josef |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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