CELTSS hosts discussion on climate change pedagogy

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Arts & Features Editor The Center for Excellence in Learning, Teaching, Scholarship and Service (CELTSS) hosted a Scholarly & Creative Showcase Series, “Toward a Radical Pedagogy of Climate Change,” over Zoom March 7. CELTSS Director Maria Alessandra Bollettino introduced the main speaker - Vandana Singh, a professor of physics and environment from the Department of Environment, Society, and Sustainability. She also introduced the panelists - Benjamin Alberti, a professor of anthropology, sociology, and criminology; Kristen Abbott Bennett, a professor of English; Ishara Mills-Henry, a professor of chemistry and food science; and Folashadé Solomon, professor of education and assistant director of CELTSS. Singh’s work has focused on “a transdisciplinary justice-centered reconceptualization of climate change at the intersection of science, ethics, society, and pedagogy,” Bollettino said. Singh thanked Bollettino, the panelists, and the audience for the honor. She started with reading lines from her book, “Teaching Climate Change: Science, Stories, Justice.” It is a dramatized and slightly fictionalized version based on real life stories from Alaska, she said. In the story, a scientist and his team set out on a nice day 30 years ago to study the sea ice, she said. But after they stepped from the shore ice to the sea ice, the Indigenous elder insisted that they had to get off the ice. Shortly after they did, that same ice broke off and floated into the ocean. In that time period, being marooned on a lone ice floe in the middle of the Arctic Ocean was essentially a death sentence, she said. The scientists in the story were saved by the elder. “He had thought that there was only one way to know the ice. But the ice hadn’t spoken to him - it had spoken to the elder,” Singh said. She shared another story about a woman who was killed in a flash flood in Louisiana after heavy rains. The storm was more likely to happen because of climate change, she said. The third story she shared was about a group of women in a small village in India who lived in an impoverished community. They “took their fate into their own hands and started to protect their forest and regenerate their forest,” Singh said. She shares these stories with her freshman class on climate change, she added. She started sharing them with her physics class in recent years. When Singh learned how dire the situation with climate change is, she felt motivated to convey it to her students, she said. She hoped they might be future “change makers.” As a theoretical physicist, she tried to do this with her general physics courses around 2010, she said. But she considers these attempts to be failures. She shared some quotes from students from the time. Some felt “despair, anger, apathy, the kind that prevents people from feeling inspired for action,” she said. But others still had misconceptions and misunderstandings about climate change, she added. “So I was failing on all accounts, and I always tell my students that failure is our best teacher, so I had to take those words to heart.” There’s been research that shows this isn’t an isolated situation - the current method of teaching climate change isn’t enough to inspire people to action, Singh said. A study in 2020 determined that one of the roadblocks is the lack of “radical visions for climate education,” she said. After taking some time in Alaska to see the ice, she eventually came to the conclusion that because it doesn’t look like the climate crisis can be solved in our current frameworks, those conceptualizations must be let go, she said. The crisis is inherently transdisciplinary, and can’t be effectively seen from only one perspective, she said. Only seeing it from the science or sociological angles isn’t sufficient. It’s also deeply related to other problems, such as social inequality and the biosphere, she added. These connections result in unpleasant surprises. Singh came across the concept of boundary objects recently, she said. “Boundary objects are things that have specific meanings in specific contexts but they have a generally understood quasi-meaning,” she said. They can exist physically, but they can also be an abstract concept. They help people be transdisciplinary, she said. She started investigating boundary objects while trying to figure out what everyone needs to know about climate science in order to recognize misinformation and feel empowered to act, she said. She came up with three transdisciplinary concepts that can serve as boundary objects, she said. They are balance and imbalance, critical thresholds, and complex interconnections. These terms can be broadly understood by anyone but can also take on specific meanings in different disciplines. Singh used the human body as an example of these concepts. If she stood on one foot, she could balance her body, she said. If someone pulled her arm, she might cross the line of being unable to recover her balance - the critical threshold. In this scenario, imbalance would be falling down, she added. Lying on the floor would be a new state of balance. The systems of the body, such as the eyes, ears, and nerves help the body determine if it is balanced or not, she said. They interact with each other to maintain balance and warn the body if they’re losing balance. Different disciplines might recognize and specify these terms in different ways, but they are broadly recognizable, she added. Next, she used the example of northern Alaska ice. The sea ice is gradually diminishing, she said. “That’s because the processes that add sea ice to the Arctic have actually slowed down in comparison to processes that take away sea ice,” Singh said. This is a state of mass imbalance. Less sea ice makes it harder to hunt, leaves more thin ice, and causes hungry polar bears to go into town more often, she said. The sea ice is also related to cultural identity. She discussed the planetary boundaries concept, which is a fairly new and active field of research with some important critiques, she said. “But what is not in question, really, is that we can’t do anything - we can’t do whatever the hell we want on this planet, that we are limited by natural cycles and tolerances,” Singh said. Out of the nine planetary boundaries - the planet’s critical thresholds - that have been identified so far, as of last year six have been violated, she said. Their interconnectedness causes the violation of one to lead to the imbalance of others. A complex system is made up of parts that can change their function because of how the relationship among parts can change, she said. She used the Arctic sea ice as an example. “The melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet actually affects ocean circulation in the Atlantic, which can, in turn, force moisture levels to drop over the Amazon rainforest and increase the chance of wildfires,” Singh said. Mills-Henry said she had similar issues with trying to teach climate change in class as Singh did. “So I appreciated that you also had experienced that and realized that it was not enough to just teach the science about carbon dioxide,” Mills-Henry said. Higher education was where she was challenged on her way of thinking, Mills-Henry said. “That’s why higher ed is important, because nowhere else will you be able to get those kinds of perspectives,” she said. Bennett said in her field they’ve been thinking about marginalized voices and how knowledge has been passed down from “the age of exploration, which is recognizable as the age of exploitation.” She feels empowered after reading Singh’s book to share some of Singh’s stories, Bennett said. “You’re giving me language for describing what I’ve been trying to do, that I’m doing off instinct and passion and fear, and all those feelings we have when we’re thinking about the climate,” Bennett said. The students will probably benefit from Singh’s framework of teaching climate change, Bennett added. Alberti said he was struck by how Singh is arguing for epistemological expansion. “What I took from your book is that this is not scientific epistemology 2.0 - this is not epistemology plus - it is an expansion,” Alberti said. Singh reminds everyone of their responsibility to their constituents in a time when the federal government is gutting the Environmental Protection Agency, Alberti added. Singh’s book shows everyone that by staying with each other, the students, and “all other companion species” the climate crisis can be confronted, Alberti said. Solomon said the use of storytelling is a good way to help people engage with these ideas. “I’m going to say that storytelling itself provides a way in - an access - to these very important components, but in ways that may be a little bit more accessible and less scary,” Solomon said. She also liked the idea of making the climate crisis relevant to students. “I think the final component that I wanted to talk about was this idea of again making things relevant to your students, or making them buy into this process of thinking about climate change,” Solomon said.