Instructional Strategies for Climate Education in the Classroom: Storytelling about Our Place in the Earth System

Abstract

It is essential that we prepare tomorrow’s scientists, engineers, and communities to respond to the ongoing climate and environmental crises to plan for a sustainable future. Successfully addressing these needs requires contextualizing learning and using student-centered teaching practices that help learners construct an understanding of the world around them. For this reason, local phenomena can successfully anchor instructional storylines—coherent sequences of lessons that connect to students’ lives and engage them in synthesizing various scientific concepts to explain how the world works and why it changes through time. Students should reflect on how they are a part of the Earth system, and how individual and collective actions can address climate and environmental problems. These shifts in teaching practices are supported by tools developed by the Understanding Global Change (UGC) Project at the University of California Museum of Paleontology to investigate the causes, consequences, and solutions to the climate crisis.

Before you dig into this chapter, I want you to think about a place that you care about in the world. It could be anywhere. It might be your living room. The tree outside your house. The park where your dog plays. A lake where you fish or camp. Now think about how and why you feel connected to this place. Is it where you live? You find comfort? You are excited to explore? What stories could you tell about this place?

Now think about how you want this place to look in the future. How and why might it change? What do you hope it will look and feel like?

If you are reading this book, this chapter, in particular, you are looking for practices to leverage the power of storytelling for climate education in the classroom. It turns out that constructing coherent stories about what we care about and how we understand the world around us is aligned with what we know about how people learn, and research-based pedagogical practices that are responsive to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Answering the questions above can always provide you with a place to start planning for instruction, and can ground your students as they learn about our changing world.

Whether or not we acknowledge it every time we talk about climate change, the consequences of a warming world will have implications for all the places we care about, including where and how we live, and the resources that determine our quality of life such as air, water, and food. Some of your students already know this because they have lived through heat waves, wildfires, or other extreme weather events, or know someone who has. Because of this reality, there are four major shifts we must make in climate education:

• 1. Create learning sequences (“storylines”) in which students actively seek to coherently connect their learning to climate change.

• 2. Interweave climate stories throughout curricula; do not teach climate as an isolated topic because everything is connected to the climate crisis.

• 3. Connect students’ lived experiences and the places they care about to their learning about climate change.

• 4. Provide opportunities to envision and plan for a resilient future in your community.

I work with K-16 educators to make these instructional shifts and integrate climate education into science, math, social science, and language arts instruction. Exploring the connectedness of our world and grounding our responses to the climate crisis in the places we care about are essential to engaging in meaningful science learning and action (Bowman & Morrison, 2021). As a teacher said to me recently, students need to “see that these topics are relevant; bring the work back to their community, their city block.”

Research has shown that understanding the Earth as an interconnected system and contextualizing instruction about a place in the world makes us more likely to be concerned about the climate crisis (Ballew et al., 2019; Zeidler & Newton, 2017). Again, many of us know this from our own experiences, yet somehow, do not consistently provide opportunities for this kind of sensemaking and application of knowledge in the classroom because we feel we have to “cover” certain material, lack of time, or other reasons (Petersen et al., 2020). But creating an equitable and inclusive classroom means leveraging student experiences and prior knowledge (Windschitl et al., 2018), and it is now more urgent than ever that we take small steps to embed connections to climate change into what we teach every day. I am not saying it is easy because most of us have never experienced this kind of learning, nor been trained in providing this kind of instruction. I personally had discrete moments in my own education where opportunities for this kind of learning could have been attempted, but ultimately fell short in various ways. I’ll tell you a story about a couple of my own learning experiences, which we will reflect on throughout the chapter.

Reflections on Meaningful Learning

In seventh grade English class, I was asked to write a first-person account of a memorable experience. I wrote about a hike in Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California from the meadow around King’s Creek into the hydrothermal area called Bumpass Hell, named for a settler who lost a leg after falling into one of the many bubbling mud pots. I wrote about the meadows, trees, flowers, and rocks I observed, and how I felt exploring, interacting with, and being a part of this place. I described the topography as we viewed distant lakes that I hoped to swim in on my next trip. Thinking about it now, there were so many opportunities to connect my observations to learning about ecology and geology, but there was no integration with the science curriculum or any other subject, for that matter. I haven’t read the essay in at least 15 years and can’t reread it now (for reasons I will explain), but I saved, and still remember doing this assignment, because it was about a place that I love. I returned to Lassen Volcanic National Park year after year, into adulthood, most recently in 2019. I suspect that if I wrote a similar story today, the scientific content would deepen, but I would still focus on what I value and how I perceived my place within, not separate from, the biological and physical system I was exploring.

One of the few assignments I recall from high school was for my biology course. We were told to explore a local environment and present to the class what we learned about that ecosystem. I chose to document the accelerating development of hundreds of homes in the hills above my neighborhood in Santa Rosa, California. This area had originally been slated for a recreational park. The new roads tore through the rolling hills of oak woodland, where we would regularly see deer, wild turkeys, skunks, and opossums. I took pictures of the construction for my report and remember thinking I was glad I would be leaving for college in a few years so I wouldn’t have to watch as the trees on the ridgeline of our little valley disappeared. Again, in hindsight, this was an assignment ripe with the opportunity to discuss the consequences of and practices for living at wildland–urban interfaces, yet we were never encouraged to investigate these larger issues related to our city’s changing landscape.

Fast forward 20 years, and the significance of what I documented in these assignments is apparent. The work, handwritten and saved in a box in my childhood room, was lost in the Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County in October 2017, along with most of the evidence of my youth and four generations of family photos, books, and other artifacts. This wind-driven fire was sparked by downed power lines in dry and low humidity conditions, and significantly fueled by those homes built in the hills above my neighborhood (Kramer et al., 2019; Watkins, et al., 2017). And, as I write this, those meadows and trees in Lassen Volcanic National Park are burning in the Dixie Fire of 2021 which has now swelled to become the second-largest fire in California history (Ilati & Moriarty, 2021). The combined effects of extreme drought in a warming world along with human ignition from failed electrical infrastructure, humans inhabiting wildland–urban interfaces, a century of fire suppression, and seasonal winds made these fires more explosive and destructive. Many of us are living with the consequences of these fires—losing homes and places of refuge and living with hazardous air quality. I am experiencing ecological grief (something I will touch on in the Introducing Phenomena section below) and learning about the policies and infrastructure that are needed to build safer communities, make decisions about how and where my family and I will live, and how we reduce the chances of even more catastrophic consequences of climate change.

Why share this story? First, it can serve as an example we will return to reflect on how to intentionally interweave climate change throughout instruction. The Earth’s climate and ecosystems are one interrelated systems, so let’s frame and shift instruction to reflect this reality. Second, constructing scientific understandings and narratives that are contextualized in the places we value—where we live, work, and play, and associated emotional connections—are important for meaningful climate change instruction (Hufnagel, 2015; Peel et al., 2017). These assignments, although lacking explicit connections to climate change or human impacts, gave me opportunities to think about my place in the world and what I value. Climate change education needs to engage learners’ hearts and minds in the here and now, not just in far-off places or in the future. My reflections on this story and how we can enhance instructional experiences are highlighted in boxes throughout this chapter.

Now think about your own educational experiences. What made learning memorable or meaningful? How could you connect that learning to climate change and local environments?

As you read, think about how you can shift instruction to engage students in constructing explanations and narratives about climate change. This chapter will give you an introduction to some of the practices and tools for:

• Supporting systems thinking and understanding the Earth as an interconnected system (that includes humans) to design unit storylines

• Contextualizing learning using focal, locally relevant phenomena

• Modeling to represent students’ understanding of how the world works and how they individually and collectively can influence the Earth system

These instructional practices can be supported by a suite of tools from the Understanding Global Change (UGC) Project at the University of California Museum of Paleontology developed in collaboration with classroom educators (Bean, 2020; Bean et al., 2020).

Systems Thinking and Climate Connections

As noted above, the causes of and solutions to climate change (as well as other health and environmental issues) are multifaceted and complex, and threaten the resources we need to survive and thrive. To be able to explain and solve current and future problems, tomorrow’s scientists, engineers, and informed communities must understand the multidimensional causes of climate change and have the skills to synthesize interdisciplinary knowledge. One such skill set is systems thinking, which is defined as the “ability to recognize, describe, model and to explain complex aspects of reality as systems” (Riess & Mischo, 2010, p. 707). The value of systems thinking to tackle complex problems has been recognized for decades (Sweeney & Sterman, 2007; Plate & Monroe, 2014), and “systems and system models” are identified as one of the Cross-Cutting Concepts that are common across all STEM disciplines in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). Exploration of systems supports the development of a “holistic” perspective, in which understanding the dynamics of the “system as a whole” is emphasized, and phenomena are explained as “emerging from the dynamic interactions between components across different levels of organization” (Verhoeff et al., 2018, p. 5). People who use systems thinking are more likely to understand the role of human activities in causing climate change and that the consequences are cause for concern (Ballew et al., 2019; Roychoudhury et al., 2017). Research indicates, however, that classroom teachers and college-educated adults have poor systems thinking skills (Sweeney & Sterman, 2000, 2007). For these reasons, educators need to provide students with opportunities to develop an understanding of the dynamic and interconnected nature of the Earth as a system, and why it changes through time. Systems thinking has been applied across science disciplines to engage learners in constructing coherent understandings of complex phenomena (Hmelo-Silver et al., 2017; Verhoeff et al., 2008, 2018; York et al., 2019).

This coherency of understanding from a systems perspective has been described by the classroom teachers I work with as “storytelling” to plan instructional sequences, and the word “storylines” is used to describe coherent instructional units aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013; Next Generation Science Storylines, 2018). This makes sense because engaging storytelling and systems thinking both require defining causal relationships and temporal sequences of events that will allow learners to construct explanations of phenomena and processes (Young & Monroe, 1996; Roychoudhury et al., 2017). This approach is very different from the way science is often taught, i.e., as disconnected, discrete bits of information that are not applied or actively used by students to explain the world around them (NRC, 2012). Instruction needs to be designed such that students explore various parts of the Earth system in relation to each other to explain how and why the climate and environments are changing (Roychoudhury et al., 2017; Shepardson et al., 2012). While the NGSS and various curricula in response to these standards support instructional coherence through carefully sequenced content and activities (Achieve, 2016; NGSS Lead States, 2013), curricula should also ensure that students are “seeking” to construct their own coherent explanations (Sikorski & Hammer, 2017). For this to happen, we need to welcome student questions and ideas and support them in connecting learning about various parts of the Earth system.

Understanding Global Change Framework

To support planning and instruction from an Earth systems perspective, the UGC Project developed a Framework of three categories of components that interact in the Earth system (Fig. 1): (1) Measurable changes at the center of the diagram are the changes that we can monitor in the Earth system over time; (2) How the Earth system works, which are ongoing processes in the middle ring of the diagram that shape the Earth through time; and (3) Causes of global change in the outer ring of the diagram, which are the ultimate human and nonhuman forcings that change the rate and magnitude of system processes, resulting in measurable changes in the Earth system. Key global change processes and phenomena (e.g., precipitation, atmospheric circulation, erosion, biodiversity) are visually represented as icons. Importantly, human activities and needs are integrated throughout this Framework, not separated from the rest of the Earth system. This is because we, as part of the Earth system, cause changes and experience the results of changing climate and ecosystems.

Fig. 1

The Understanding Global Change Framework

I want to emphasize that this UGC Framework is not something to introduce to K-12 learners all at once, but can be used for planning instruction among educators and shared with young learners over time as a series of topics for exploration. The “Simple” Framework with the spheres (i.e., atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere) in the upper left corner of Fig. 1 has been used by classroom teachers as an organizational scheme for subsets of the concepts, allowing them to build up to the complexity of the full diagram over time. For more about how to use the Framework with students, please visit the Planning for Instruction page on the UGC website (Bean, 2020). For a more comprehensive introduction to the Framework appropriate for high school and undergraduate students and educators, view the slide show called Understanding Global Change 101 (Bean et al., 2020).

Regardless of what grade level you teach, you can find topics on this Framework that are part of your science standards. Elementary school standards—including energy, the carbon and water cycles, organismal growth and life cycles, and ecosystems—lay the essential foundation for understanding the climate system. In middle and high school, almost all science standards can be connected back to the causes and consequences of, and solutions to, climate change. Standards that do not explicitly include the phrases “climate change,” “environmental change,” or “human impacts,” still provide countless opportunities to apply a systems perspective and explore various connections. Just asking ourselves as we plan, and then asking students, “How will this (biological, physical, or chemical) process respond to climate change?” opens the door for students to share ideas and explore how and why climate change is relevant and connected to what they are learning. Table 1 shows some more concrete examples that students could explore using various data sets and activities. Additional examples of climate connections are on the Understanding Global Change Website content pages (Bean & Marshall, 2020).

Table 1 Example climate connections to foundational science topics

Take a minute to look over Fig. 1 and identify the topics you teach. The UGC-NGSS Crosswalk spreadsheet on the UGC Planning for Instruction page (Bean, 2020) can also help you explore the K-12 NGSS standards relevant to each topic/icon in the UGC Framework. You can determine which grade level standards you plan to address, and then explore how you would coherently “connect the dots” from these topics to climate change.

Finding the right data sets to make climate connections in your curriculum takes time, but remember your students are also a resource that can help guide your planning. Provide opportunities for them to ask questions reflecting how they might seek to coherently connect climate change to their personal experiences and learning across the curriculum. Climate change is a theme we should come back to again and again throughout instruction so that students can use an Earth systems perspective to figure out how seemingly disparate topics are unequivocally interrelated.

Connecting My Story to Climate Change and the Earth System

If we come back to the examples discussed from my own education above, we can identify many key concepts and pathways to connect these assignments to climate change using the UGC Framework. Specifically, if we reflect on the essay I wrote about Lassen Volcanic National Park, there were opportunities to connect my observations to explore seasonal patterns of plant and animal growth (productivity and biomass) and biodiversity (measurable change icons in the center). The biology of this place is related to the Earth system processes (middle ring icons) that shape the land (rock, water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus cycles), which influence the soil quality and nutrient levels (measurable change icons). These are all processes that are affected by climate change. In that essay, I remember writing a lot about the water in King’s Creek, streams running through the meadows, and the lakes. Understanding water use and availability, precipitation patterns, how our water cycle is changing, and in turn patterns of precipitation, snow, and ice cover are all fundamental to understanding the impacts of the climate crisis and how we will need to respond now and in the future. In this essay, I also reflected on my place in this relatively remote ecosystem, which could be more deeply explored in relationship to human impacts and land management practices (habitat loss/restoration and deforestation/reforestation, causes of change icons in the outer ring). Again, these were not connections my English or science teachers made, but my essay would have provided ample material to connect my personal experience to these topics.

Although not everyone would write about a hike in a national park if given an essay prompt about a personal experience, a similarly open-ended assignment in the twenty-first century can be framed with climate connections in mind. For example, to connect students’ stories to climate change, ask them to pay attention to the presence (or absence) of water in their narratives, or to note if the place they are writing about has changed over time. Students could also be asked to envision this place in the future and think about how they hope it will look and feel (see the reflective questions at the beginning of this chapter). Again, climate change touches all corners of the Earth, whatever our students write about, so let’s support our students to connect the dots between their lived experiences and the consequences of, and solutions to, a changing world.

Similarly, the project about the new homes constructed in the hills above my neighborhood could be connected to so many climate-related topics: urbanization (in this case severe suburban sprawl), burning of fossil fuels (because while the city allowed the construction of hundreds of million-dollar homes, we lacked investment in public transit and everyone drove EVERYWHERE), habitat loss, deforestation, pollution, and freshwater use, as well as habitat restoration, reforestation, and renewable energy, topics related to the future I hoped for and envisioned. And, of course, the connection I could not foresee as a 15-year-old was how these housing projects at wildland–urban interfaces made our community extremely vulnerable to devastating wildfires (Mann et al., 2014). There are many interdisciplinary connections that can be explored about climate, land use, and ecosystem changes through time.

To reiterate, standards do not have to include the phrase “climate change” to be connected to learning about the climate crisis and our personal stories. We can work to identify and interweave climate connections throughout curricula, and we can also frame learning around climate-related issues in our communities. In the next section, we will explore how to frame learning around exploring climate issues and solutions.

Anchoring Coherent Instructional Storylines with Climate Phenomena

When you examine the UGC Framework, you will likely recognize topics that you teach that are in your standards, or that you know are connected to content in your curriculum. Based on the standards alone, we could likely map out a unit of study about various topics in the Earth system that are related to climate change appropriate for your grade level. We could imagine a unit that starts with understanding the carbon cycle, and then addresses human emissions, and the greenhouse effect, and then maybe explores some of the effects of climate change, such as sea level rise or wildfires, and then maybe engages students in discussing possible solutions, but without diving in too deeply to any one climate change topic. This could be similar to the structure of most units of study that I experienced in high school or college in the early 2000s. I might have learned some new (horrifying) facts, but I’m not sure I would have known what to do with this information or understand how my life is connected to the climate crisis. Let us reframe how we teach to support students in constructing explanations about how and why the climate changes and connecting learning back to their own experiences.

Suppose we want students to figure out how to use and apply scientific concepts and practices, as well as leverage their prior knowledge and lived experiences. In that case, we need to anchor their learning around observable and measurable climate phenomena. An appropriate anchoring phenomenon is a complex real-world event or process that requires students to synthesize various science concepts to formulate an explanation (NGSS, 2016; Reiser et al., 2017; Windschitl et al., 2012). Because anchoring phenomena are complex and multifaceted, students should investigate and revise explanations of the phenomenon over weeks of instruction. Anchoring phenomena should be distinguished from investigative phenomena, which are often smaller in scope and can be explored in one or maybe two lessons. In other words, you can have a series of investigative phenomena in a unit that support the exploration of a unit anchoring phenomenon. A compelling anchoring phenomenon should also be relevant to students’ lives and allow them to explore the phenomenon by engaging in the practices of science, such as analyzing and interpreting data, and arguing from evidence, as outlined in the NGSS (NGSS, 2016; NGSS Lead States, 2013).

An anchoring phenomenon about climate change should challenge your students to co-construct explanations and stories about specific places and times, meaning that learning can be highly contextualized in places that are familiar to your students. That could involve a place as accessible as your school, a local park, your watershed, or a larger region such as your county or state. That is not to say that students should not learn about far-off places, including the shrinking polar bear populations in the Arctic and the burning of the Amazon rainforest over the last 30 years (these are important investigative phenomena!). However, having opportunities to apply and connect what they learn about places around the world to the phenomena in their local environments can be more effective for the students to build a systems perspective with enhanced personal relevance. Additionally, learning about regional phenomena should be connected to global, large-scale processes, such as the greenhouse effect, ocean circulation, or resource extraction and distribution (Lehtonen et al., 2019). Once you have settled on an appropriate phenomenon based on the guiding criteria explained below, you can then decide on the appropriate learning resources and activities that can be used to help students construct their understanding of the phenomenon. (Note: Based on my experiences working with professional learning communities of teachers, selecting a phenomenon and finding relevant data can be the most challenging part of the planning process. Be patient with yourself and try to discuss your phenomenon with colleagues or find local experts to help you if you feel stuck.)

To identify anchoring phenomena about climate change, you can start by thinking about the measurable changes in the Earth system at the center of the UGC Framework because phenomena should be observable, either through direct or indirect observation using instruments and technology for monitoring these changes. These are changes that can be observed and measured over time (the time scale will vary depending on the topic and context for the unit of study you design) and could be compared in different locations. The measurable changes in the UGC Framework are by no means a comprehensive list of potential phenomena, but provide a place to start thinking about which aspects of climate change you want students to investigate.

At the very center of the UGC Framework are the measurable changes that most directly affect human life—air and water quality, food availability and nutrition, health/disease, and where we can live (or where we are displaced from due to changing conditions). Ensuring that anchoring phenomena connect back to the quality of human life (hint, most of them do) can focus, motivate, and sustain students’ interest in learning as they have opportunities to apply their knowledge to construct explanations and explore solutions to issues that they face in their communities (e.g., Taylor et al., 2019). Additionally, to explain the consequences of and solutions to issues posed by these measurable changes requires that students consider the ultimate causes of change as well as the Earth system processes that are altered with climate change. Table 2 provides a checklist of criteria for identifying phenomena for climate change units. Some of these criteria are adapted from NGSS (2016) and Ambitious Science Teaching resources (Windschitl et al., 2014, 2018).

Table 2 Criteria checklist for identifying anchoring phenomena

For example, we could start with the measurable changes of fire and sea level rise for two new instructional units. We could then contextualize these phenomena and connect these topics to students’ lives by exploring locally relevant data sets. When working with school districts in Maryland, we focused on the phenomenon of sea level rise by investigating how the frequency of sunny day coastal flooding events in Annapolis and the western shore have changed over the last 100 years (see graphs and photos from Boesch et al., 2018; Marder, 2020). In San Diego, California, where wildfires repeatedly threaten communities, we can compare housing development and land management practices in neighborhoods that have been resilient in wildfires to the practices used in neighborhoods that were destroyed. We can then determine how these practices can inform how and where we build homes in our own community (Sommer, 2019). Both sea level rise and wildfires, of course, have very direct impacts on the quality of human life, both threaten to displace human populations. Additionally, sea level rise reduces freshwater availability and soil quality, and wildfires affect air quality and respiratory health, and contaminate water sources and systems.

Introducing Phenomena

Once you have decided on an anchoring phenomenon, you can determine how students will be introduced to the phenomenon. Students should not be “told about” the phenomenon, but presented with images, videos, data sets, or a combination of these that represents this measurable change in the Earth System. On a somewhat personal but relevant note, as someone dealing with trauma from wildfires and ecological grief, I recommend being sensitive to the experiences of the students in your classroom when selecting the images, videos, and data sets that will be used to introduce the anchoring phenomenon. For example, I know that some of the students in communities where I work in northern California would be sensitive to images of homes burning, as I am after the loss of my family home. For this reason, I would not use these images but focus on starting a unit with data in the form of graphs, maps, and information that might be useful for understanding and responding to wildfires in the future. While an image of a burning house, or a flooded neighborhood after a hurricane may catch some students’ attention, it may not best serve other instructional purposes. Research indicates that learners can have very strong emotions in response to climate change topics (Lombardi & Sinatra, 2013). This may happen even if learning is framed in service of understanding how we can build a more promising future. It is best to acknowledge the emotional responses that are felt in your classroom about climate phenomena (Hufnagel, 2015, 2017).

Once you have identified the anchoring phenomenon, you can formulate unit-driving questions to help focus and engage students in their learning. For example, using the phenomena of sea level rise and wildfires described above: “How and why have sunny day flooding events become more common in the last 30 years?” Or “Why are some communities more resilient in wildfire-affected areas than others?” I would also add the question, “How can we make our communities more resilient in response to these changes (flooding or wildfires)?” The driving question(s) should not be answerable with a yes/no response and should require students to connect ideas throughout the unit to explain the focal phenomenon. Driving questions that are sufficiently complicated often include the words HOW and WHY. For this reason, the unit will need to include a series of learning opportunities for students to construct an explanation of the phenomenon. In other words, all learning experiences in the unit should serve a purpose and contribute in some way to students’ ability to answer the driving question(s). Student responses to the driving question can be revised and revisited as the unit progresses.

Returning to My Story: Understanding Our Changing Communities

Recall that for my high school biology course, I was asked to document a local ecosystem and report back to the class about what I observed. This assignment was probably for a unit about ecology and ecosystems (I honestly cannot remember), and everyone gave presentations about different ecosystems in our county with varying depth and focus. I really do not remember much of the specifics, but one student reported on oak trees that were dying of sudden oak death (Cobb et al., 2020), but not really about the trees in the larger context of the ecosystem. I imagine that most of my classmates wondered “Why does this matter?”. I likely recall this presentation because I’ve always loved oak trees, as demonstrated by the acorns I collected, and my copies of Ansel Adams oak tree photos.

Looking back on that experience now, I think about how much more engaging that (presumably ecology and ecosystems?) unit could have been if the learning had been anchored in an exploration of our changing landscape and the effects of climate change in Santa Rosa. To launch this unit, we could have made observations from historic and current photographs of familiar places in and around the city that would elicit our thinking about land use (urbanization, deforestation, agriculture) and Earth system processes (water, carbon cycle, etc.). Additionally, we could have explored local data about biodiversity, temperature, and precipitation patterns, or how our local waterways have been altered by dams and agricultural needs over time. Framing the unit in this way would have grounded our learning in opportunities for us to use this information to tell the story of where we live and how it has and will change. This exploration could have happened over the course of an entire unit (or even two or three units, there are so many system connections to explore!). The ecosystem in which we lived should not have been a side project as we learned some concepts about ecosystem structure and species interactions. I’m guessing that’s what we were learning about? Again, I can’t remember the details because the learning was not grounded in examples in the real world, or my world.

A unit about local ecosystems could have introduced me to important historical events, like the Hanly Fire of 1964, which burned in almost the exact footprint of the Tubbs Fire that destroyed my family home (Van Niekerken, 2017), or the land management practices used by various native peoples to reduce the risk of destructive fires (Flores & Russell, 2020; Long & Lake, 2018; Marks-Block & Tripp, 2021). We could have explored ecosystems in other parts of the world and then applied that learning to thinking more deeply about our own environment. And there still would have been a place for a project like the one I completed about the construction in the hills above my neighborhood, but I envision students working in groups to share their information in service of answering an investigative question about a local issue. For example, “How should we manage water use in our city given current drought conditions and future climate projections?” If this had been the question to guide my original project, I would have reported back about the sources of water that would be needed for the new homes, and the landscaping choices that could be made in response to limited water supplies (there was a lot of grass in those yards). This allows students to tell the story of what they have observed, and hopefully, the resilient community they will help to shape in the future.

Final thoughts on anchoring phenomena:

• As I mentioned before, selecting a phenomenon can be a very challenging part of the planning process for embedding systems thinking and local connections in your curriculum. It takes time to identify a compelling phenomenon, and do the research to find engaging photos, videos, and data sets. Be patient, try things out, and revise as necessary. Planning for this kind of instruction is a dynamic, iterative process, just like the nature of science itself!

• I also want to remind you that climate change is complex, therefore, you will not always know the answer to student questions, and that is OK! Let me repeat, you (and nobody else, Ph.D. climate scientists included) cannot have all the answers to all the questions we face about this existential threat facing humanity and ecosystems across the entire globe. Your phenomenon might even leave the door open for new questions and ideas from students that were not originally envisioned as part of your unit. That is also OK! Meaningful learning comes from students seeking their own coherence, and it’s better if they collaborate with you in researching topics of interest and constructing an understanding of the phenomenon. We need to start feeling more comfortable teaching without knowing all the answers, and finding time to explore climate issues with more depth and purpose.

• Climate change is a multifaceted, difficult problem that forces us to think about how we live our lives, thus asking us to pay attention to our own individual and societal ethics and values. For these reasons, climate change is often referred to as a socio-scientific problem (Peel et al., 2017; Sadler et al., 2004). All of us need food, clean air and water, healthcare, and a safe place to live. But the way we currently live is unsustainable and will lead to more human suffering and ecological destruction unless scientific, economic, and political decisions are made to stop our use of fossil fuels, draw down greenhouse gas levels in our atmosphere, and find ways to adapt to the changes that are now unstoppable. Your climate stories will not always have happy endings. But we desperately need our students to be armed with a scientific understanding of climate change and Earth systems that empower them to fight for the societal changes that could allow us to sustain human populations and ecosystems around the globe for generations to come.

• Finally, make sure your students have ways of sharing their thinking and explanations of phenomena. Learners will have misconceptions about climate change (Shepardson et al., 2017). Therefore, it is important that students feel safe to show what they know, and what they do not know and want to learn. Modeling activities, discussed in the next section, can serve as assessment tools for understanding student thinking.

Storytelling with Modeling

When we tell a story about something that has happened in our lives, to family, friends, or colleagues, we do not always communicate coherently and clearly. Maybe we forgot to include information that the recipient needs to put the pieces together to understand why something happened. Maybe we needed to provide more context for the story about the people or the places involved, or we gave superfluous information that was not relevant to the story, or we recounted something out of sequence that confused. Any number of things can happen. But through questioning and responding to the person receiving the information, hopefully, a more complete story can be provided. If you have ever repeated the same story a few times or edited a manuscript, usually the second or third attempt is more coherent and streamlined than the first. For this reason, students should have opportunities throughout instruction to use what they know and construct and refine explanations of the world around them. The scientific practice of modeling allows us to externalize our stories and explanations, and visualize systems connections (Passmore et al., 2017; Windschitl et al., 2008).

The National Research Council (2012) Framework for K-12 Science Education defines models as “concrete ‘pictures’ and/or physical scale models (e.g., a toy car)” in lower grades “to more abstract representations of relevant relationships in later grades, such as a diagram representing forces on a particular object in a system” (p. 58). Furthermore, modeling can and should serve a purpose in developing ideas, by inspiring new questions, explanations, and predictions, and is not simply an end product to represent scientific concepts (Gouvea & Passmore, 2017). Evidence suggests that the construction of models can support sensemaking and the development of a holistic systems perspective as learners tackle complex problems or explain phenomena (Gilissen et al., 2020; Hmelo-Silver et al., 2017). While the use of modeling is not always tied explicitly to systems thinking, modeling phenomena can  support instructional coherence and the development of systems thinking skills (Svoboda & Passmore, 2013). Riess and Mischo (2010) defined systems thinking as “the ability to recognize, describe, model and to explain complex aspects of reality as systems” (p. 707). Three of the four competency dimensions used by Schuler et al. (2018) to measure systems thinking skills in students and student teachers explicitly include the learners’ ability to construct, evaluate, and use models to solve problems or make predictions.

The UGC processes and phenomena icons (e.g., precipitation, atmospheric circulation, burning of fossil fuels, biodiversity) can be used to construct models about climate change either using physical materials (cards, paper, pens) or an online modeling tool (Bean & Nielsen, 2018). Modeling can be used both for planning instruction to visualize conceptual links within a unit and as student formative and summative assessments within units of study. Learners can use the UGC Earth Scene as a background for drawing arrows and providing written explanations of the connections among the components at various scales (Fig. 2). Alternatively, students could use a diagram or photograph of their local environment as the background for models, depending on the location and scale of the processes that students want to represent. Additional smaller-scale models of specific processes, such as the greenhouse effect or the combustion of fossil fuels, could also be constructed to help students visualize chemical and physical mechanisms in the system. Iterative modeling allows students to visualize the climate system and determine what they know or want to know about the phenomenon under investigation,  and helps the instructor gauge the coherency of students thinking as they construct stories and explanations.

Fig. 2

An example Earth System Model constructed with the Understanding Global Change Earth Scene and icons

Ideally, students should work collaboratively and share ideas, especially early on in a unit of study, and modeling should be a low-stake activity. As the unit progresses, students could alternate between individual work, group model revisions, and whole class discussions to critique and refine explanations expressed in the model. Models should be revised over time as students explore the cascading effects that a single cause or measurable change can have on other parts of the system and the well-being of their local communities. For example, in a unit about sea level rise, students have constructed increasingly more complex models as they expand their understanding of the causes and consequences of, and solutions to sea level rise in coastal communities (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Models of sea level rise that explain the mechanisms of land ice melt and global warming (left). A more complex model (right) includes the ultimate causes of global temperature increases (emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, agricultural activities, etc.), mitigation (renewable energy, reducing emissions), and adaptation strategies (coastal habitat restoration). These models were constructed in the UGC online interactive (Bean and Nielsen, 2018), a tool that also allows for annotation of the Earth system connections (not shown)

As you plan for instruction and students create models, it will become apparent that all the UGC Framework icons can be interconnected to construct one, complicated (and difficult to interpret) model of the Earth’s system. For this reason, if students are allowed to select which icons to include in their models, they are likely to include icons and ideas that are irrelevant to the focal phenomenon, inaccurate, or incomplete. To help guide learners through revising and refining their models, they can use the seven system characteristics to help define their models: boundaries, components, interactions, inputs and outputs, feedback, dynamics, and hierarchy (Gilissen et al., 2020). Exploration of these system’s characteristics during model construction can help to structure group and class discussions and clarify student thinking about the part of the climate system under investigation. These models then become resources for students when they complete written assignments or presentations about the phenomenon.

Finally, modeling is a mechanism for envisioning the world we want in the future, and the stories we want to tell generations to come. Models can help us explain the changes we need to make individually and collectively to solve the climate and environmental problems we have caused. For example, we can examine the various methods for reducing atmospheric greenhouse gases presented by Project Drawdown (Hawken, 2017), connect them to our system models, and think about how these solutions should play out at local and regional scales. Models can focus learning and thinking on what we value, and guide us toward the actions, both large and small, that will help keep communities around the world safe and sustain the resources on which we depend.

Returning to My Examples: Modeling My Stories

I often wondered about the purpose of the assignments I was given in school. I must admit that I was always curious, which is probably what made me ultimately complete my schoolwork. I was worried I would miss something important. But I often asked, “How could I use this information now or in the future?” Modeling climate phenomena in your community answers these questions. It provides an opportunity for learners to recognize how connected the world is, and how much our well-being depends on the state of the Earth system around us.

I wish my classmates and I had been asked to model our stories and explorations of local ecosystems. I doubt that any of us would have predicted how rapidly our community would be changed by wildfires, but our models would have been records of what we knew then and what we valued. We could have shared and collaborated to connect and compare elements of our experiences and investigations instead of working individually and then being evaluated for a grade. We could have collectively thought about how our community is changing, and how we want it to be in the future. These are the stories that will help us understand and respond to the climate crisis.

Final Thoughts

The climate crisis is here, and we need to make instructional shifts now that will prepare the next generation for current and future challenges. The tools and practices presented here support learning about climate change by:

• Leveraging anchoring phenomena to contextualize instruction in local environments. This makes climate change relevant and immediate and brings purpose and meaning to learning experiences.

• Connecting science learning to climate change across the curriculum to understand how the places we live and the resources we need across the globe are affected by climate change.

• Making student thinking visible through modeling the Earth system, thus creating space for students to share ideas and construct knowledge.

• Allowing learners to envision a resilient future for themselves and their communities.

Don’t work on these instructional shifts alone. Find colleagues and networks, such as the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN, 2021), with which you can share your struggles and achievements in teaching climate change.

These practices and tools do not have to be implemented all at once (this is not an all or nothing situation). We should examine and revise curricula from an Earth systems perspective and seek opportunities that allow students to explore their place in the Earth system. Instruction must explore the multifaceted solutions and support learners to envision a future that sustains human communities and ecosystems. Using these techniques, we can explicitly connect learning about the climate crisis to what we value and provide students with opportunities to construct stories and explanations about climate phenomena relevant to their current and future well-being.