#MakeClimateAClass (University / Grades 8–12)

#MakeClimateAClass is a global campaign organized by the WorldWide Teach-in on Climate and Justice, an initiative run through Bard College. Thousands of other Climate Concerned faculty members will be taking part in this campaign in March and April 2023.

We know that you have a lot of material to cover in your spring classes. However, with climate change, we are at a truly extraordinary moment for humanity. As an educator, helping students understand how they can engage with climate justice and climate solutions from the perspective of your field is vitally important. As you are planning your spring syllabi, please find half an hour in each of your courses to #MakeClimateAClass.

In Class Teach-Ins: #MakeClimateAClass

This model is for climate-concerned teachers, not climate specialists, to talk about climate in their classes from their own disciplinary perspective. This approach engages students with the idea of pursuing work and careers in solving climate. It can be done by a single climate-concerned teacher, or a group. And if teachers do it once, they are likely to keep doing it year after year.

(1) Devote 15 minutes to talking about how their discipline—artists, or biologists, or engineers, or psychologists or sociologists—are helping develop climate solutions.

(2) Then have an alumnus (or a local expert, or specialist colleague) working in climate join and discuss their work.

For grades 8–12, teachers can find detailed lesson plans from many disciplines at SubjectToClimate.org, and the resources at the National Wildlife Federation’s #Teach10HoursForClimate.

Done! 

This is a 30-minute carve out. Given lead-time, all climate-concerned faculty will be able to find a spot in the semester for this. And students can lead in getting this Teach-In to happen by asking all their teachers to #MakeClimateAClass in this way.

To scale this up, four faculty can do it together, reaching over a hundred students with multiple perspectives on climate careers, a model we call #Co-TeachForClimate.

Visit Climate Teach-In Models webpage for more information.