Programs for Educators

Interested in creating a program for your educators? Check out our programs below for inspiration and/or start a conversation.

Teaching Climate Justice: A Workshop Series for Teachers

What we will provide:

• In-depth instruction in various approaches to climate education, and specifically climate justice education

• Individualized coaching to develop climate justice project-based units

• Strategies to support teachers and students in navigating the emotional dimensions of this material

• Access to CCE’s suggested collection of supporting resources

• Opportunities to learn from outside speakers, including authors, activists, and educators

  By the end of this series of workshops, participants will have gained the confidence and skills to be a climate justice educator and will be able to:

• Explain basic concepts and terms related to climate change and specifically to climate justice (e.g. feedback loops, environmental racism, climate gentrification)

• Articulate the intersections and parallels between the harms of racism and harms of climate change

• Reflect on their own relationship/connections to climate change

• Implement strategies for nurturing student and teacher wellbeing and mental health in the context of climate justice

• Devise their own project-based unit focused on climate justice

Workshop Session 1

Locating ourselves and each other in this work ● Introducing key terms, frameworks, and histories of climate justice ● Setting goals and identifying questions for unit development and personal/community growth ● Pedagogical practice 1: Introducing students to climate change in the humanities and/or sciences ● Pedagogical practice 2: Pointing to examples of youth resilience and resistance in an age of climate change

Workshop Session 2

Deepening our understanding of climate injustice, racism, and settler colonialism by listening to the voices of frontlines communities ● Practicing mindfulness and engaging in personal reflection to grapple with the emotional impacts of teaching climate change ● Pedagogical practice 1 : Using role play activities to help students grapple with the breadth and interconnection of climate impacts ● Pedagogical practice 2: Using storytelling projects to help students locate climate justice issues in their own communities ● Pedagogical practice 3: Teaching the literature and history of climate justice

Workshop Session 3

● Unpacking case studies in climate justice and considering the ways in which climate impacts intersect with existing social inequities. ● Practicing the “teleconnected imagination” by considering how a particular environmental or social issue, perhaps one relevant to Vermont or New England more broadly, is connected to climate justice ● Pedagogical practice 1 : Constructing interdisciplinary climate justice case studies that focus on locally-relevant issues ● Pedagogical practice 2: Helping students and teachers grapple with climate anxiety, despair, grief, outrage.

Workshop Session 4

● Exploring the ways in which individuals and communities around the world are fighting for climate justice and constructing a more just, sustainable, and equitable world ● Pedagogical practice 1: Strategies for cultivating student imagination by using games and other interactive texts that foster future-oriented thinking ● Pedagogical practice 2: Strategies for cultivating student agency by developing community-engaged projects and bringing activism into the classroom

Workshop Session 5

Workshop Session 5: ● Building our units and sketching out classroom practices Filling in the gaps ● What’s next? What do you need moving forward? ● Pedagogical practice: Sharing out our in-progress units

Interested in creating a program for educators? Let’s build together.