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 Justice
The Attack on Anti-Racist Teaching Is an Attack on Environmental Justice Teaching
In his magnificent new book, How the Word Is Passed, Clint Smith quotes the Rev. Dr. William Barber II: “The same land that held people captive through slavery is now […]
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.
Protesting Pipelines
There is something about oil and gas pipelines. The way you can look at a map of hundreds of thousands of miles of the terrible tubes, seeing how tightly the […]
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 […]
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 […]
Teaching Haniyah
Several years ago, I taught a unit on power in my 9th-grade social studies classes at Berkeley High School in California’s Bay Area. It’s a diverse school—rich folks from the […]
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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The Tsunami and Other Disasters
The Dec. 26 tsunami swept away the lives of more than 200,000 people and ravaged the livelihoods of millions more. Throughout the world teachers and students discussed the tsunami and […]
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.
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.
“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.
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.