Ecological Footprint Calculators Are Bad for the Environment
For years, I would coax my 9th graders into the dreary, windowless computer lab for 10-15 minutes so they could complete an online ecological footprint calculator. I wanted students to […]
Climate
As She Rises
I recently stumbled across a podcast that made a wonderful addition to my students’ study of the climate crisis — As She Rises.
Action Research for Environmental Justice in the Kindergarten Classroom
A kindergarten teacher helps students investigate issues of environmental justice — like access to green space — in their communities.
Helping Young People Imagine a Future of Climate Solidarity
We need more books that celebrate young people who find themselves as they come to consciousness and commitment.
Teaching the Green New Deal: The Prequel
In an article introducing the student-friendly short video, A Message from the Future, about life after the Green New Deal, Naomi Klein points out: Almost every vision of the future […]
Necessary Trouble
Wolfe-Rocca describes her mixer around the “Valve Turners,” a group of climate disobedience activists who put their bodies on the line to stop the harm of pipelines.
Teaching the Green New Deal: The Prequel
In an article introducing the student-friendly short video, A Message from the Future, about life after the Green New Deal, Naomi Klein points out: Almost every vision of the future […]
A Message from the Future II: The Years of Repair
The latest installment of our regular Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms column.
Youth vs. Apocalypse
A high school English teacher reorients his classroom to be a space for student organizing for climate justice.
We Need to Ask Our Students to Dream — and to Dream Big
Back in the 1980s, I taught an elective class at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, called Literature and Social Change. It centered around the questions “What is a good […]
Dirty Oil and Shovel-Ready Jobs
High school students learn about the conflict over the pipeline by participating in a role play.
Our Climate Crisis Is an Education Crisis
Why is there so little teaching or discussion of climate change in classrooms?
Got Coal?
Students play a game promoted by the coal industry, then dig beneath the surface to look at the realities of mountaintop removal mining.
Coal at the Movies
Video resources for the classroom, plus links to activist websites.
Science for the People
Ninth graders develop science literacy as they become neighborhood environmental experts and activists.
Review: Our Dignity Can Defeat Anyone
By Julie Treick O’Neill A review of the film Maquilapolis [City of Factories]
Polar Bears on Mission Street
San Francisco fourth graders learn about global warming and take action to save the polar bears.
Continent Ecology
Children’s books that promote environmental education in the primary grades.
Teaching About Global Warming in Truck Country
Helping kids who’ve grown up in the truck culture” examine climate change.
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When Small Is Beautiful
The principal of Brooklyn’s El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice shows how art can connect students with their communities.
Exploring Our Urban Wilderness
My students’ home terrain consists — at least on the surface — of houses, streets, schools, and stores. Like many urban kids, the bit of unpaved, unfenced nature my second […]
Teaching About Toxins
A Rethinking Schools editor explores the environment’s effects on her students’ health in the classroom.
Solar Power Comes to Math Class
A math educator brings data from a friend’s solar panels — and the story to win them in their community — into her 7th-grade classroom to build a bridge between math and climate justice education.
The Green New Deal and Our Schools
So often, the climate crisis is presented in frightening, threatening terms: rising seas, superstorms, raging wildfires, unlivable temperatures, species extinction, disappearing glaciers, dying coral, climate refugees. These are real. But the paradox is that this dystopian possibility is forcing us to imagine an entirely different kind of society. Schools have a central role to play in devising new alternatives and equipping young people to bring those alternatives to life. This is the work we’ve been assigned.
‘Billionaires Can’t Teach Our Kids’
There’s no need for teachers in other cities to reinvent the wheel: study Los Angeles.