Teaching About Toxins
A Rethinking Schools editor explores the environment’s effects on her students’ health in the classroom.
Climate
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.
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.
“Because Our Islands Are Our Life”
A high school ethnic studies teacher describes how students in the Pacific Island Club used poetry to refocus the narrative surrounding climate justice onto frontline communities.
‘Billionaires Can’t Teach Our Kids’
There’s no need for teachers in other cities to reinvent the wheel: study Los Angeles.
Teacher Unions Take on the Climate Crisis
As young people across the country join the global movement to mobilize school strikes to demand climate action, one group is starting to think more seriously about how to best support those efforts: their teachers.
How One 2nd-Grader’s Story Inspired Climate Justice Curriculum
A 2nd-grade teacher shows how connecting a student’s home to the classroom led to profound lessons for all her students — in this case, about pipelines and climate justice.
The 2020 Presidential Election: Educators Speak Out
We asked a group of radical educators to weigh in on what they hoped would be part of any 2020 presidential candidate’s education platform.
Teach the Fossil Fuel Industry — Our Students’ Enemy
“Climate justice” education means a lot of things. But one key aspect is that we involve students in probing the social and economic roots of the crisis.
Where Are the Climate Change Superheroes?
An elementary school teacher developed the Quetzal Conundrum game to help students understand the impact of global warming in Costa Rica.
Students “Warrior Up” for Climate Justice
The third installment of our new environmental justice column celebrates the annual two-day Climate Justice Fair at Madison High School in Portland.
Teaching the Truth About Climate Change Is Up to Us, Because Textbooks Lie
The second installment of our new environmental justice column focuses on one part of a resolution passed by the Portland, Oregon, school board that mandates the school district not use text material that doubts “the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities.”
“Stupid Book of Wrongness”
A teacher shows his 3rd- and 4th-grade students the Heartland Institute’s climate change denial book that was sent to every science teacher in the nation.
Teaching to the Heart
Using Marshallese poet and climate justice activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Dear Matafele Peinam,” a teacher helps 7th graders think about the sacred spaces in their own lives and how they will be affected by climate change.
The (Young) People’s Climate Conference
A teacher adapts the “Climate Change Mixer” designed for older students as a springboard for a unit on global warming and climate justice.
“No One is Going to Tell Us What is Right”
A journalist explores the way Indigenous language and community is connected to the classroom in several communities in Alaska, and explores how educators there have built new frameworks to fight against Eurocentric curriculum.
Kids Sue for Right to a Better Climate // Teachers Take on Trump Era
Two days after the election, 21 plaintiffs, aged 9 to 20, won a critical court ruling on the constitutional obligation of the U.S. government to protect our children’s right to […]
“Coal Poisons Everything It Touches”
Ninth graders explore a plan to strip-mine coal in Wyoming and Montana, send it by train to the Northwest, then ship it to Asia to be burned.
Rep. Barbara Lee Calls for Climate Education in All Schools
“We need to teach every young person the human impacts of climate change and how to combat the climate crisis before it is too late.” By Bill Bigelow Congresswoman Barbara Lee […]
“Just Look Outside” — Teaching Climate Change in Alaska
By Soren Wuerth This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The first week of […]
Teach the Fossil Fuel Industry — Our Students’ Enemy
By Bill Bigelow This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. A while back, I […]
The Green New Deal and Our Schools
By the editors of Rethinking Schools As Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope wrote recently in The Nation, “There is a runaway train racing toward us, and its name is climate change. […]
Take Sides for the Earth and Teach Climate Justice
TEACHING CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS As we celebrate Earth Day, we invite you to join us in taking sides for the Earth by teaching climate justice and becoming […]
#StandWithOkinawa: We Need The World With Us
By Moé Yonamine “Don’t cry here,” an 86-year-old Okinawan grandmother I had never met before told me. She stood next to me and took my hand. I had been visiting […]
Students “Warrior Up” for Climate Justice
[This is the third installment of our new environmental justice column — Earth, Justice, and Our Classrooms — and celebrates the annual two-day “Climate Justice Fair” at Madison High School […]