Podcast SE3EP2: Insights on Climate Change Education with Ellen Field
Explore climate education and youth empowerment with Dr. Ellen Field, Assistant Professor at Lakehead University, Orillia, Canada. Gain insights into climate literacy and youth engagement. Join the conversation on a sustainable future. 🌍🎙️
Delve into Ellen's extensive research, which offers valuable insights into climate change education policy and practice. Discover how we can nurture climate literacy and empower students to take meaningful action, all while addressing the unique challenges posed by this crucial subject.
Gain profound insights into Ellen's research on youth climate anxiety, shedding light on the emotional toll of the current climate crisis on young individuals. Explore the roles of educators, policymakers, and resources like Live It Earth in supporting the next generation toward a sustainable future.
Tune in for a thought-provoking conversation that will inspire positive change. Don't miss this episode dedicated to fostering a new generation of environmentally conscious citizens.
Transcript
BLUE
Hi, my name is Blue. And I'm the host of this new podcast, the 21st century teacher with Live it Earth. And my job is to ensure that our teachers and students get the most out of our programs. This new podcast series is just one of the ways I'm going to be supporting our community of educators, with a monthly conversation with a special guest educator discussing a different aspect of 21st century teaching and learning.
A reminder that if you're a teacher in British Columbia, and now the Yukon or the Northwest Territories, thanks to focus education resources, you now have access to our blended learning library for K to seven teachers. If you'd like more information about our programs, please visit our website live it.com. Today, I'm excited to be talking with Ellen Field who is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University, where she teaches climate change, education, and environmental education. Alan's research focuses on policy and practice of climate change education, she has completed a research study that will result in case studies on creative and diverse ways that teachers are implementing climate change education. Ellen has also completed a national study on youth climate anxiety.
So today, I would like to start by acknowledging that I am in the Slocum Valley just north of Nelson BC. And this is actually the traditional territory, the unceded territory of the snake, the silk, and it's now hot, and also 5000 from the Matey nation. And I'm incredibly grateful to get to live, work and play here where I've raised my three sons with my wife, who is actually Metis Cree, and we are very diligent about raising them with a connection to nature, and their surroundings, and also to understand something about the peoples, the first peoples that walked before us.
And today, I'm really excited to have Ellen Field with us. And Ellen, I'm really grateful that you've taken time out of your day to join us. Thanks for having me. So let's dive straight into our first question, which is, how do we teach climate literacy and also empower them for action. And having said that, I'm really interested as a parent, raising my kids to have an understanding of, you know, the environment and some of the issues that are coming up. What are the challenges with teaching such a big, scary topic?
ELLEN
Thanks for that. And I like it, we're starting with the big question, because it does require a bit of unpacking. So if you follow me a little bit, I'll just sort of unpack that a bit. I agree completely with you that climate literacy is the first step. And it's so important to start there. And over the weekend, I talked to an 11 year olds about this. And, and it was interesting, he asked me, he said, you know, what do you do? And I said, well, I do research on climate change education, and how climate change should be taught in schools. And he sort of said, “Cool”, and then I asked him about how he learns about it in school. And he said, I don't. And so then I asked him about how he learns about it (climate change). And he said well on the news, and through his own experience, and said, you know, this winter was so weird, the wildfires, he said, I know what it is and learn about it.
And so this is like a small anecdote. But kids are learning about climate change, whether it's in the news or family conversations, it is around them. And it's not always in schools. And so coming back to your question a little bit, kids also learn about challenging topics in schools all the time, because it's information they need to know in order for them to be ready to respond to what's happening in the world. So I'm going to highlight this idea or the need for responsive education systems. And this is where I'm going to kind of take a step back and unpack it a bit.
Because in the 21st century, we're living in this moment, where humanity is facing several intersecting crises. One is the climate crisis. Another one is really it's not so much a crisis, but sort of the way that technological disruption and the emergence of AI data surveillance, how that will transform society. And the third is really around our democratic institutions, our equity and wellbeing and how these institutions as well as those systems are being challenged by systems that are not serving people or planet and with this, I'm referring to the shift in distribution of wealth over the last 40 years to the one in 0.01% and the ways that income and wealth have intersect with other social vulnerabilities like gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and immigration.
And so these are all actually, sadly, social determinants of health. And so all three of these are what some scholars and people refer to as the polly crisis of the 21st century. So if education systems intend to be responsive to the challenges of the 21st century, then they need to be contending with these arising challenges of our time. So back to this question about some of the challenges of learning about scary or challenging topics. So one of the things that kids learn about that's really scary just to give a few examples of this. I have a daughter who's in grade one and this year, she learned about school lockdowns and what you do in a school lockdown drill. And it was so confronting to her. But it's a requirement for her to know what to do in the event that there was an active shooter that came into her school. Right? And, I mean, this, she learned about it four months ago, and we she'll still have it, it'll still come up, but in moments, and she'll say, if, if we needed to have a lockdown? Is this where we would hide in the room? Or do we hide over here, right. But this is an important thing for her to know if there was this event, how to respond in the moment. Okay.
Another example that kids learn about is really around Truth and Reconciliation in the 60s Scoop, where indigenous children were taken from their families and placed into the child welfare system, often without consent of their families. And so this is really scary stuff for a young learner, that idea of being taken away from your family, without consent, your family agreeing, I mean, that's the stuff of nightmares. But society and school leaders have recognized that this is important for learners to know, so that history does not repeat itself, so that systemic racism can be identified and named. And so the same as for the lockdown drill.
And so there is this need to prepare students for the world that they live in. And in many dimensions of their learning, they've learned scary things in order for them to be prepared. Now, I would argue the odds of an active shooter coming into a classroom in Canada are actually quite low. But if you asked young people today, have they experienced climate change? Most of them will say yes.
And so it's this interesting sort of dilemma we're in is to why some really scary topics, okay to teach, and then others are not there. And so this is really where I think we can raise that the narrative on climate change has really been fundamentally flawed and politicized. So climate impacts we're experiencing are really just symptoms of the carbon cycle and the water cycle being totally out of whack. And its natural systems trying to regulate that there's too many greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. And we need to get real, like, we need to get so much better in our comms and in our education, I'm connecting the dots of what is causing climate impacts.
And you don't have to dig very far. But but you do have to dig like, if you look at communications on the latest fire, or flooding event, how many articles mentioned fossil fuels as the primary driver. Often it's just climate change. And so we really need to get a lot better at connecting those dots. And this is where a lot of educators get uncomfortable. Because this has been politicized because of how fossil fuels are tied to our economy. But if you look at the refuted, or the unrefuted evidence, what is causing climate change, it's fossil fuels. And so we need to figure out, like society, not necessarily in her classroom, but on a social level, we need to figure out how to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. And just like the analogy of health, like if you are sick, and the doctor says you're at risk of cancer, and they say, I need you to adjust your lifestyle, you do it. So it is a scary topic, just like any health scare, because we're facing uncertainty. It is an existential moment, and we're asked in this moment, like Will we kick the habit of a pack a day and make healthy choices? Or will we continue on a path that we know will affect our health in our lifetimes, and most certainly affect the generation following us.
So you know, just to sort of solidify the impact, every 10th of degree of warming will cause human suffering. So we really don't have much wiggle room as to how much we can say, Oh, well, we, we just want to ensure that our shareholders get an order like that is actually direct human suffering.
And so we have to ask ourselves these hard questions in our policies and actions. So never in the last 100,000 years, has a concentration of co2 in the atmosphere been as high as it is, in May, which is always the highest that the carbon dioxide concentrations are recorded in a year, we hit a new high, of course, as we do every year, but a 424 parts per million. And in the modeling, if we continue on trajectories that many developed countries currently have Canada included, are for two, probably three degrees of warming. And we're already experiencing about 1.1 to 1.3 degrees depending on where you are in Canada.
And you can already see the stress in these systems and the natural system trying to regulate the extra greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. So the challenges with teaching young people, that we're facing unprecedented risks, and that our governing policies do not safeguard stable climates for them means that young people will most likely feel betrayed. So if we're (not) teaching climate change ed, in a way that actually gives young people the full picture, they're probably going to feel betrayed. And this is a big part of climate anxiety.
So from my own experience, I teach a grad class and climate change education in our MFA program, at Lakehead. Students often experience a psychological fallout that occurs. And these are older students, these are not, you know, your grade one students.
But it happens in almost every year that I teach the course. And they come to learn that the world's governing systems are not protecting people or planet when it comes to climate impacts and their well being. And so I do lots of things in my class to sort of help prime them that the content is going to cause them some distress, that there are strategies, coping strategies they can do while they're learning. And then as we move further into the content, they're going to learn about all the solutions and all the things that can be done. But we first need to establish this baseline of both urgency and risk that we currently have.
So as educators and adults, I think we have to ask ourselves, do we treat young people paternalistically and decide that they're too young, too immature to learn about climate change and the reality of it? Or do we decide to be honest to share with them the reality that we're facing unprecedented risk and uncertainty that previous generations have basically not taken care of them. And by being honest, and it is scary, we're able to maintain trust. We provide them an opportunity to learn about this throughout their educational experience, so that they do not feel blindsided when they come to understand it in its full complexity. Or find out that this information has been guarded from them.
And so from an educational perspective, we actually do a bigger disservice to children and young people. When we shield them from the truth, however scary it is. So the level of cognitive dissonance that many young people experience, as I describe this 11 year old, I talked about over the weekend, as they go through school, it's very high. And so it's up to our education system, or policymakers or school board administrators or department heads and our teachers to ensure the students are receiving quality climate change ed, and to ensure that our education systems are being responsive to the challenges we face in society.
So climate, yes, but all of these other challenges, because they're quite interlinked. And so there are also big changes that are required to shift our systems to be more responsive. But I think one of the things that is missing when we frame climate impacts in its uncertainty as only negative is we rob the future of hopeful possibility. And so our window of opportunity in the moment is closing but we still have space and time to take action. And we're at such a profound moment in human civilization where if we dress the symptoms that the natural world are expressing and deal with root cause in a fair and equitable way, we'll have such transformed and better lives. And so this is also opportunity knocking.
So, we really sit in this place where many of us as adults, as well as young people involved in climate justice movements are helping chart hopeful futures.
And the last thing I just like to say about this is that when we take kids seriously, and trust them with information, you can allow them to feel empowered to take relevant actions, find local solutions. And so for me, I'm really, as a teacher educator. And as someone who's done research with teachers, I'm feel like I'm constantly impressed with what I'm hearing teachers are doing. And so I really advocate for supporting teachers to allow for those flourishing conditions in their classrooms, to empower kids to be honest with them, so that their ideas can be wildly sold throughout our school systems.
BLUE
Yeah, that's great. Yes, super interesting. Yeah, it got me thinking a lot, having kids myself, and being involved in outdoor education. So I'm wondering, and I think about this with my kids. I have a nine year old, a four year old and a one year old. So he, you know, early days for him. Am I'm right in saying you completed a national study on youth climate anxiety? So I'm wondering, what can you share with us about that?
ELLEN
Yes. So we, Dr. Lindsey Galloway, who's the Canada Research Chair in socio ecological health, and I work together on this project. And we followed up so there was a really important Lancet study in 2011, led by Carolyn Hickman, that did an international, the first sort of international benchmarking of climate anxiety among young people. But Canada wasn't included. So the original study had 10,000 young people from 10 Different countries, the UK was included, but Canada wasn't.
And so what we did is we replicated that study to ensure that we had a Canadian benchmark for a benchmark for Canada. But we also added eight questions to the survey tool to ask the young people who are surveying ideas for what are the supports that they need and the ways that they do handle their different coping strategies. So just the big picture.
The study looked at 16 to 25 year olds, so these are high school students in mostly post secondary or out of high school - they weren't all in post secondary. And, I mean, I think for folks who are familiar with any of this research, the big picture, the way to summarize it is - the kids are not alright.
But really young people in Canada are experiencing a constellation of challenging climate emotions at high levels. So I'll just read a few of the stats just to sort of succinctly share what those are.
So all of these are between 66% and about 55% ain't afraid, sad, anxious, helpless, powerless and angry. And in terms of that 80% of participants report the climate change impacts on their overall mental health and 40% report at least moderate impacts on their daily life. And the survey data really show that climate change is contributing in myriad ways to their negative thoughts about their future, so: 48% believe that humanity is doomed; 73% report thinking that the future is frightening; 76 report that people have failed to take care of the planet; 39% report hesitation about having children to climate change.
And so our data really shows because we asked young people as well about how they feel the Canadian government has responded. And it shows that inaction at the systemic and structural level shapes the lived experiences of the climate, emotions and climate anxiety among young Canadians. So 64% don't think the Canadian government is doing enough. And that correlated with a sense of betrayal. So that compounds that experience of climate anxiety.
As well, we found, and this one's really interesting, and I think for organizations that are doing work with, especially teenagers, in this space, I don't know exactly what the programmatic answer to this is but I think it's one that we really need to focus in on: so 25% of young people identify that they seek a mental, emotional and mental health support from others, so a quarter of them do.
However, a third of them also report they don't talk about climate change, even though so many of them are experiencing it. And then another third reported that when they do they feel ignored or dismissed.
So how do they then cope if they're not talking about it. And among teachers I have talked to (so this is separate to the survey.) Generally teachers have said that this only comes up mostly in one on one conversations. So informal conversations in the hall. And other research suggests that young people don't feel that they actually want to talk about their emotional vulnerability in their classrooms with their teacher, but they don't feel safe to actually share about how they're feeling around this.
So that's where I think it's a really interesting space for organizations to think about how to provide these other support spaces, or how, let's say a school social worker, is also providing the support in naming climate anxiety. So I think there's a lot of work in there.
BLUE
So yeah, I find it interesting because, when my kids, so I guess it's hard not to when you have your own kids, not to think of it through a parenting lens and sort of see how they reflect what they're picking up, back to me, and I find on a younger level, they very much advocate for the environment, my kids do anyway.
With the programs that we do at Live It Earth, (for example we have one from last year on Arctic communities), it's cross curricular learning, but we use some of these climate change issues as an anchor point to do the learning around. So it's not necessarily within the curriculum, but we kind of use it and bring it into the curriculum in that way. And at the end of each program, but it's not technically the end of the program, but it's the piece that will come at the end, if you're working through the program as a teacher, and we have a call to action. And that call to action could be a number of things, but it's certainly getting the kids to, to have that focal point at the end around something positive that they can do to take away from it. So like, Oh, we've learned all these things. Now can we do let's let's, let's be proactive in that way, which I really, really like about our programs. So I'm wondering, there is a cross curricular guide for seven to 11.
So I'm wondering, if you've done any work, or you've got any ideas around the K-8, any ideas that you can share around that.
ELLEN
And I think the piece I'll just also add about climate anxiety is, and then speak to the younger grades, you know, climate anxiety is not considered a like a mental illness, it's not a diagnosis, in like, medically, and there's research that's showing that for most people, having a level of climate anxiety is normal, it means that you are aware of what's happening in the world, you see these changes, and so for most of the population, it won't turn into generalized anxiety. But for a part of the population, it might. So don't want to just say it's totally normal, don't worry about it. I mean, it is upsetting, it is unsettling.
So just to sort of foreground that, and so whatever grade appropriate strategies are put forward, I always suggest that a teacher uses their understanding of that student's social emotional well being as to how they teach the content, and climate change education has always been really sort of situated in the science, and it's always been very cognitively focused in terms of what kids, when they do learn about it, it is generally through programs that are generally designed around sort of that knowledge and understanding of the science, and then the impacts and then what maybe society can do.
But I as research is really proliferating around climate anxiety, as well as the coping strategies that are effective, we do need to be mindful of how our education systems can help respond and take on what that research is sharing. And so teachers, teachers are really actually the best position because they know their students, and they know where they're at. And so whatever frameworks are put out there, I think it needs, you know, we need to also consider the social and emotional dimensions of this learning. And so a teacher should be able to say, actually, I'm going to maybe move the really climate stuff, maybe two months into the future, because my class is just, we're not, you know, there's a lot of conflict in the class right now. We're just not in a good place. And so that's where I think all of it needs to be sort of, at the discretion of the teacher to gauge where their students are at.
However, there are some really interesting examples. So when we look at systems of education that actually have integrated climate change education, New Jersey is a great example, because they've integrated it throughout their K to 12. system. And so and they've implemented it, they've been, I think it's this year is one year that it's been in full implementation. So there's learning that can happen out of like those kindergarten classrooms, you know, what are the conversations? How has it been integrated in scaffolded. And mostly, this every, all the research that I've seen coming out of New Jersey, is that in those early years, as you said, the focus on solutions orientation, that kids love animals, and they also love being outside, and they want to help, like young learners really want to be helpful. And so the way that that can be scaffolded, in that solutions orientation, I think is really relevant.
And the other piece, that I always suggest as sort of a guideline is, I mean, I think K to 12, should have much more outdoor experiential education that it currently does, for all of the co benefits that outdoor experiential education has, for all types of learning, whether that's math, language, social studies, history, but specifically for climate, there are so many co benefits that help with with some of the difficult parts of climate anxiety. So, you know, being outside can improve self regulation for young learners, it can also help them get much more active. So if you're doing a tree planting then that can also help sort of offset that feeling of not having any control or not being a part of taking action. And so the more that learning can shift, especially for early younger learners but I would say the whole K to 12 system, outside to being action oriented, and outdoor just to help offset so much of the climate anxiety, is going to help.
BLUE
Yeah, I totally agree with that. As an outdoor educator for many years, I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. And so well actually, let's jump to this question I have for you
ELLEN
Actually, can I add one more thing?
BLUE
Yeah, of course.
ELLEN
Because I think it's interesting, I walked to school with my daughter who's in grade one. and we have to walk down the side of the school, which is where the kiss and ride is, so where the kids who get dropped off by their cars, and it's like this plume of exhaust that we walk by, and my daughter who is, (and everyone's idling, because they have to because it's a slow incremental move up the line) and I you know, I don't want to blame those parents, I understand not everyone can walk to school or the, you know, there's various reasons. But my daughter mentions, often she'll say, you know, we talk about it, and we are lucky that we recently got an EV (electric vehicle), we were able to transition to having one. She'll say why don't people drive EVs. So we talk about the cost of we talk about all of these things. But I think young learners get it in terms of, you know, where you can shift to walking to school, it's better for them, that reduces their emissions, biking to school, or there was I would say like 10 to 20 years ago, there was I feel like much more anti idling information. And I've seen that go away in my area anyway. So I think there's a lot that can be done there. As well as eating low carbon diets, which also have all kinds of health benefits as well. So there's so many ways that the co benefits of sort of leading or living a lower carbon lifestyle can also help young people. So as they're learning, outdoor, experiential Ed, for sure, but there's all kinds of other lifestyle things that can be integrated. And a lot of those things can be integrated into the classroom.
And always using the lens of equity and inclusion because not everybody can get an EV, not everybody can walk to school. So you know, always infusing it with incentring justice.
BLUE
Yes, that's great. And yeah, we're very lucky. We're two blocks away from school. So yeah, walking to school is not an issue in a rural community where we live, but many do have to drive because we are in a rural community. So people live in the satellite villages and, you know, out homesteading or whatever. But it's interesting. I think the impact of kids connecting to nature is massive because I think unless you care about nature, it's really hard to then sort of pulling in the other pieces? So, yeah, how important, you know, in the work that you've done in the studies, you know, as you talk to teachers and students, how important is the actual connection to the natural world as part of this education? And what does that look like in schools? I know you've already said that there needs to be more of it. But from your experience, what are people doing? Have you got any examples of what's being done well, that other people could take on?
ELLEN
Yeah, sure. I would also, it's an interesting piece, because nature based education, I'll just start with this first, nature based education is so important for developing that relationality with the natural world and in developing that appreciation.
I actually don't, I actually disagree with some of the literature that sort of claims that that will lead to people taking action. I think those are, those are different pathways that are often around identity development and social group norms, and the ways that action and activism arise. So nature based experiences from the work, from the way that I articulate that for education is often around the co benefits and the importance of that relationality for us to understand that we are, we are a part of the natural world, that there are life cycles, that there are, that there are systems that are much larger than us that govern life serving systems. But I don't always think that it leads to, you know, Youth Climate Leaders, because a lot of the Youth Climate Leaders that I've talked to, don't necessarily have a strong background in nature connection, they have been exposed to groups like Friday's For Future, they've been a part of different social groups that have allowed them to see or they've come from social justice, and they've brought that background. So I do find sometimes there's like a claim there, that doesn't always link to what creates leaders or leadership.
In terms of programs that work well, we know from research that when young, the most effective way to get young people involved, is to ensure that they are in social groups that support the acceptance of climate change, as well as teach leadership capacity. So they actually teach leadership skills. And all of the really effective youth groups that I've seen, have often come out of leadership programs in high schools rather than environmental extracurricular clubs. And so we sometimes think that, like if we teach the knowledge about what's happening, then young people are just going to sort of innately take leadership. And I think there's, it's important to recognize that having a sense of efficacy, and having actual explicit leadership skills taught is going to be a stronger determinant of ensuring that young people take action, take leadership. So there's a variety of programs that offer that. Like, I know, the Gaia project has a Youth Climate Leadership program that they run in the summers, which I think is a powerful sort of incubator that does explicitly teach those leadership skills.
There's also quite a few interesting programs that teachers tap into, to get Destination Imagination, which is a stem challenge, so to build something, and to solve a problem. And some teachers I know will take that call, (it's like a competition across all kinds of high schools), and they'll take that call, and they'll infuse it with a climate or sustainability challenge if it's not explicit and in, and that way they get their students to do solutions that way. There's a future cities program as well, which is like to design the same kind of competition challenge. So any of those kind of hackathon models, I think are really effective at the high school level, to get people to get students actively engaged in solutions and thinking diversely, creatively and innovating.
So the as well as like some of the design thinking projects that are happening are very powerful. The one sort of resource I'd really like to highlight is the climate Atlas of Canada, which is just an incredible resource for educators, I would say, grade six and up is probably the right grade levels to be working to be using it. But it takes, it basically allows for you to look at any region, and to look at current climate impacts across a whole bunch of different variables, and also look at the future emission scenarios and impacts for that region. But then there's all kinds of really great media and focus stories around solutions. And they have an entire piece on indigenous examples of solutions, and also stories, so I think that's a really rich place to look for content.
BLUE
Yeah, no, that's great. I mean, here are Live It Earth the programs that we're doing our focus is to because it's K to 9, but often it's K to 7 range here in BC, is to get them really excited and interested about the topic, and then pull them back into activities in a hands on way to go and explore and get in the nature around them. Even in a city, it could be interesting at the local park. And that way, I think that's our focus is to really create that connection. And that sense of caring at a young age, and just to create the inquiry, you know, curiosity really, but to start asking questions, and hopefully, with the call to action that we have, as well, bringing that in, is to make them feel that they're, you know, learning and being productive, you know, doing what they can do in a little bit within their home and within their community. And so, I'm just wondering, with resources, like Live It Earth, what can we learn from the research and analysis?
ELLEN
Sure, yeah.
BLUE
Do you have any tips and tricks so we can be better at doing what we're doing?
ELLEN
Well, I think actually, that model is probably aligned with best practice, right, to have a tangible, real world experience. And then to scaffold information around that experience, so that it's personally relevant and localized. Like that really, is what we want to do. So that climate change isn't like this abstract, monolithic thing, but it's something that we can ground down to, and understand that it's also experienced differently, depending on where you live, how the geography affects it, all of those pieces. So I think that really is best practice. And then to have that solutions, orientation of community based action, like let's do something in our community. So that's like the best, right? That's what we want.
In terms of what we've found when, last summer, we interviewed teachers, we surveyed and interviewed teachers across Canada. A couple of things that I think is maybe helpful, is, again, this affirming piece that teachers are really the best decision makers around what should happen in the classrooms. And we're really happy to see that they're integrating it in subjects where there's no curriculum expectations, like there's a teachers integrating into math, into drama, into where there's no explicit mention. So that's like, really great to see. And that doesn't surprise me because I work in teacher education, I see all of the future oriented, caring people we graduate every year. But I think one of the things that was interesting, that came up in our research is that teachers, the majority of them, sort of cherry pick resources. So they often will, they'll often take from this resource, this resource, this resource, to then find a way to tie it to curriculum. So they say that what they provide in the classroom is always connected to curriculum, but they seem to do a lot of curating and creating, innovating among their resources. I mean, the teachers that we sampled are motivated, they were motivated enough to fill out a survey we asked them and then during a follow up interview, so it's not a representative like subsection of teacher, but I think that that's really interesting.
So when organizations are developing programmatic pieces or resources, just to recognize that it's good to have them be short pieces, so that a teacher could take this one piece and then take this other piece, so that your content is curriculum tied, but it's not like they have to necessarily do the whole entire you know, two week lesson plan or whatever like, because they do tend to cherry pick.
BLUE
That's great. It's really interesting to listen to you because yeah, so much of what we do at Live It Earth, all our programs are tied to curriculum but also centering around these issues, big, big issues in various communities around Canada. So I think that yeah, there's a lot of connection there anyway, with the work that we do. Do you have any further thoughts around climate change within the school system? And, you know, are we headed to a point where it's going to be brought into the curriculum in a meaningful way? Or is it going to be the teachers, as you mentioned, just bring it in themselves
ELLEN
It's a great question. And I wish I had like a crystal ball to call upon. So I would say from my vantage point, like, as we were talking earlier, I'm on the team of six authors who are developing for UNESCO, the greening education guidelines that countries will be suggested to implement. So we at least have a framework, but it does feel like we are at a groundswell where climate change education all of a sudden, is named and its absence is clear, right? One of the challenges in Canada's is the federated education system. So we have sub national jurisdictions, so we don't have a national curriculum. And research I've done on a sub national level we evaluated every single curriculum, territorial and provincial. And it's really, there's so many levels of policy and coherence.
So there's a lot of work to do in reorienting it to ensure that every student has some mandatory climate change education. Currently, a lot of it's sitting in those grade 1112 electives is where you see the majority of the expectations. And so there's a lot that needs to be done there. And there's a lot of sort of shifting it away from just sort of the climate science and the cognitive and rather seeing it as a lens through which we see all of the subjects, right that we need to broaden our subject understanding as well as sort of dimensional so see, the justice piece action oriented and associate socio emotional, rather than just focused on it cognitively. So there's a lot of work there. But one of the things that I think is really interesting, is in Canada, how the calls for Truth and Reconciliation were made and the school system responded. And you know, you could hear critiques around that implementation, but there was quite quick implementation of truth and reconciliation within schools. And so I'm hopeful that, we will see that with climate change education, and we just have to find ways to keep policymakers and school board administrators accountable, and also de-politicize it. We need to constantly find ways to de-politicize this, and just show that we need this, young people need it.
I would love to see the Education Act in Canada, right, which is what we have, which governs the responsibility of our school boards to ensure that children are safe. And there's guidelines around that, and this notion of local, parental or like supervision, but when we think about intergenerational injustice and harm that young people are experiencing, and we're seeing young plaintiffs take governments to court around this intergenerational human rights based claims. Can the same be said around our education system by not providing young people the skills to be able to not just survive, but I mean, there's a whole emerging carbon economy, there's so many opportunities here. And if you look at the current trajectory, or the current framework that subjects go through, I mean, how are they preparing young people also for AI? How are they preparing young people for the realities that we're facing the 21st century, and what young people will be graduating into.
So I think it's a real moment for education systems to pivot and to reorient and to do so quickly, and it's possible. We saw with COVID-19 that governments take quick responses. We saw a school system take quick responses. It's possible if the leadership is there.
BLUE
That's a great note to end on. And I really appreciate it. Yes, super interesting talking to you, and yeah, good to end on a positive note, too. Because yeah, there are lots of big things coming. So yeah, thank you so much for taking the time today and I'm really glad we connected and I hope to keep in touch because yeah, a lot of the work that we do is very much aligned with the work that you're also doing.
ELLEN
Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure chatting.
BLUE
Thanks for joining us on the 21st century teacher, and we look forward to seeing you next time. Please do subscribe so you don't miss out on the next show. And also don't forget to check out our fantastic online learning platform, which is Live it.Earth. Thanks again and we'll see you soon.
