The ABCs of Climate Change

By Matt Troher

I don’t remember being taught about climate change. Are today’s teachers working to make sure students learn?  

Rosie Jurasas, a 22-year-old senior at Loyola University Chicago, sits at the front of her classroom of 20 second-graders. She’s holding a book; its cover is a cartoon seascape with aquatic animals living in a plastic-riddled ocean. It’s titled What a Waste: Trash, Recycling, and Protecting our Planet.

Jurasas is student teaching at Jordan Community Elementary, a bilingual school located in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood, 2 miles from Loyola’s lakeshore campus. The North Side neighborhood is often cited as the most diverse neighborhood in Chicago, with roughly 34% of Rogers Park residents being foreign-born. Most of Jordan Community’s students hail from non-English speaking households.

Second grade is when students at Jordan Community start the gradual transition from learning in Spanish to learning in English. This week, the class is using picture books to practice English reading and speaking skills. The school’s administration gave Jurasas a set of picture books pertaining to the environment — particularly the negative impacts humans are having on our climate — to read to her students.

As Jurasas begins her lesson, she notices an unexpected barrier to her students’ comprehension. They don’t really know what they are reading about: “The books were assuming that they had a background knowledge about climate change, but I don’t think they did, to be honest.”

To supplement her lesson, Jurasas took it upon herself to give her students a fundamental understanding of climate change and the role we have in creating it. She found YouTube videos for kids about global warming and fostered discussions about waste production. The unit culminated with a dialogue about the changes individuals can make to reduce their environmental impact.

“It was interesting to see their faces and their reactions when we would read facts about how, literally as of right now, in 100 years we will have no rain forests, or how plastic doesn’t actually really go away even if you recycle it,” Jurasas said. “I think that really shocked them.”

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As I spoke with Jurasas, I thought about my own educational experience. No matter how I racked the farthest corners of my brain, I could not recall ever being taught about climate change. I evidently learned about it at some point, but I cannot pinpoint a moment in my educational experience where I first encountered climate change the same way I can pinpoint when I first learned how to find the average of a set of numbers (third grade), understood what a preposition was (fourth grade), or read The Great Gatsby (10th grade).

When I was in the shoes of Jurasas’s second-graders 14 years ago, I learned about the life cycle and the states of matter, but nothing about the climate or environmental degradation. Instead, I think my knowledge of the topic came from non-curricular sources: the TV, the radio, and the internet.

While it was heartening to hear about Jurasas introducing her students to such an important topic, I couldn’t help wondering if her intervention was closer to the exception than the rule. What if today’s students are still left to their own devices to learn about climate change? With younger generations growing up under the sway of social media, riddled as it is with misinformation, how will we be assured that their knowledge of the most pressing issue of the current age is correct?

To see where social media sits in the realm of climate education, I opened a new tab on my laptop, pulled up YouTube, and searched the words “climate change.” I made sure to use an incognito tab to minimize the influence of my previous search history on the results. The first result was a brief news clip from Good Morning America titled “Community Relocates due to Climate Change Displacement.” The second result was an hour-long documentary “Climate Change: What Will Our Lives Look Like in 2050?”

The third result, however, was a 4-week-old video with more than100,000 views titled, “NASA Engineer Tom Moser Reveals the Truth About Climate Science.” I looked at the channel. As it turns out, the third result YouTube returned for a search about climate change was from The Heartland Institute — a conservative and libertarian think tank The New York Times described as “the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism.”

Children are naturally curious, and the first step a child of any age takes to satisfy any unbridled curiosity nowadays is — for better or for worse — social media. As climate change becomes a more prevalent topic, young people will become curious. I can’t help but fear that if this curiosity stems from a lack of coverage in the classroom, there’s a very real chance that children will get their information from unvetted, politically motivated sources.

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From a moral standpoint, our education system has a duty to prepare children for the world they’re about to enter. As climate change’s effects on our world become increasingly severe and experts urge immediate action, today’s students must be provided with accurate information about a changing world. As Rita J. Turner, a lecturer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, sums up in her book Teaching for EcoJustice, “One of the most essential skills that education can help to cultivate in students is the ability to imagine possibilities that are different from those presented by the dominant culture.”

Before I dug any further, I wanted to make sure that this lack of climate change education was a far-reaching problem, not just a product of my own forgetfulness. I wanted to see if other people my age had similar experiences. I found that I am not alone.

I spoke with Scarlett Hoffer, an undergraduate at the U of I in the Earth, Society, and Environmental Sustainability program. We met on the last day of March 2023 and sat on the outdoor patio of the Illini Union. The temperature peaked at 72 degrees; the strong central Illinois wind kept blowing the pages of my notebook into disarray.

Hoffer described herself as an outdoorsy kid, spending her childhood catching frogs in the creek near her house and running from the garden snakes that resided in her backyard. “Every time I was bored, I’d go outside,” she told me. But Hoffer’s experience in nature was not matched by education in the classroom. “I definitely don’t remember the topic of the climate or climate change [being brought up] in high school,” Hoffer said. “I never got any sort of explanation from the teacher.”

Instead, once Hoffer first encountered the term “climate change,” she turned to outside sources to satisfy her natural curiosity. As she was born before the advent of social media, Hoffer turned to books and conservationists to learn about the topic.

“I was a big bookworm as a kid, like reading encyclopedias type of kid, and I went to the zoo all the time,” Hoffer said. “I’d read, or hear from workers at the zoo, that because of climate change these types of animals are losing their habitats.”

Other students noted this climate-related gap in their education as well. Halie Collins, a senior studying civil engineering, spent part of her childhood in Japan. When she entered the American school system in middle school, she noticed a striking lack of environmental content in both the curriculum and in the broader American culture.

“I grew up in Japan where they’re very waste conscious,” Collins said. “It’s a really small country, and they don’t have a lot of space for waste, so they have a very well-planned and executed waste management plan. When I went to middle school and high school in the United States, it was really easy to identify things where the United States is lacking in terms of sustainability.”

Cecilia Milmoe, a senior in the creative writing program, put it more bluntly: “I don’t remember that happening at all in middle school or high school. I cannot think of a time where climate change was talked about.”

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To get a sense of what the state of climate education in today’s high schools really is, I met with Cyndi Smyser, a science teacher at the University of Illinois Laboratory High School. Commonly known as Uni High, the laboratory school serves just over 300 students in a gothic-revival building in the midst of the university’s engineering campus. As I walked through the front doors, I felt as if I had walked into a promotional brochure. Nearly every one of the school’s tan lockers was personalized with drawings, posters, and magazine clippings. Murals adorned the hallways. A cartoon dragon was painted on the door to the library. To the left of the library’s entrance was a poster of Greta Thunberg accompanied by the phrase: “You are never too small to make a difference.”

Smyser teaches organismal biology and scientific research methodology while serving as the executive teacher for the school’s science department. Her classroom door is covered with posters and flyers for the different clubs she runs: Healthcare Club, Biology Club, Psychology Club, and Women in STEM. She’s the faculty sponsor for the sophomore class, serves on the school’s crisis team, and mentors for the Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering program held at the university. I was surprised she had the time to meet with me.

After our brief tour, we settled in Smyser’s classroom on the school’s third floor.

Smyser taught the school’s Environmental Science class for three years before handing the course off to an incoming teacher. Since Uni High receives most of its funding through the university instead of property taxes, teachers aren’t bound to school board standards like most public schools. Instead, teachers have free reign to construct their own curriculum.

Smyser used this freedom to structure her Environmental Science course around Rachel Carson’s influential Silent Spring, a book about pesticides perhaps best known for helping spark the broader environmental movement. Her students would read a chapter, then do a project relating to its concepts. For one unit, her students were to redesign Disney World after studying the effects that developing Florida’s swampland had on the local ecology.

As a self-described environmentally minded person, Smyser saw the importance of teaching about climate change, both its causes and the effects it will have on human populations. But, year after year, when it came time for the class to focus on climate change’s effects, Smyser ran into a challenge. Formerly engaged and passionate students would, almost suddenly, lose all interest.

“Students have just been inundated with it,” Smyser said. “I really did find that they were just so done with hearing about climate change.”

When describing how students typically react to a lesson on the effects of global temperature changes on various species, Smyser let out a long, exasperated sigh. “I feel like I depress them for an entire semester. And, you know, as a teacher, I want to uplift them and teach them how to make things better.”

When asked about the causes behind the students’ disengagement from climate change in the classroom, Smyser cited the unique demographics of Uni High. The high school’s admission rate is 32%. Many students are children of professors at the university or come from academically minded households that encourage their children to meet the rigorous admission standards. These households are more likely to foster conversations about current issues such as climate change. To generalize, these aren’t the students who need to be taught about climate change.

Prior to teaching at Uni High, Smyser taught in Danville, a city of just under 30,000 residents roughly 40 minutes east of Champaign, right along the Illinois-Indiana border. Smyser encountered a similar resistance to lessons about climate change in Danville, but the reasons were far different from those at Uni High.

“The high school I taught at before this one was in a very conservative evangelical Christian community, and many of [the students] were just flat out with like, ‘The weather seems fine to me,’ ” Smyser said. “When people are basing their ideas on something other than data, it’s really hard to use data to convince them otherwise.”

Smyser is not alone in wanting to integrate climate education into the classroom. According to a recent poll conducted by Gallup and the Smithsonian Science Education Center, 83% of American teachers believe that teaching about sustainability-related topics — such as clean energy, responsible consumption, and climate action — would have a positive impact on the world. However, only 17% of American teachers reported receiving the necessary support to successfully implement these topics into their curriculum, with the biggest impediments being a lack of time, instructional materials, and expertise. While some states, such as Washington, New Jersey, and Connecticut, have passed legislation requiring and funding lessons on climate change, such statewide initiatives are much more likely to be passed in states with legislatures already friendly to climate-positive initiatives.

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It was time for me to bring the issue of climate education in American schools back home. The locker-lined hallways and school-event posters of Uni High reminded me of my high school years at Downers Grove North, a school of just over 2,200 students situated in the heart of the politically moderate western suburbs of Chicago.

When I went to North, the options for science courses were clear-cut. Freshman year you take biology, sophomore year you take chemistry, and junior year you take physics. Three years of science were all that was required by the school board, but a variety of electives were available for interested seniors — one of which was Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Science.

I’ll be forthright; I was not a science kid in high school. My interests centered around literature and the arts, so when I slogged through physics and finished my third year of science, I instantly opted for no elective. However, I remember hearing rave reviews from my more science-minded friends about AP Environmental Science (known as APES), likely the most popular science elective at my school, and its teacher, Mr. Heinz.

APES covers a variety of topics pertaining to the natural sciences, including ecosystems, biodiversity, Earth systems, and atmospheric pollution. The course’s last unit, the largest in the AP curriculum guide, focuses on global change. The APES curriculum not only focuses on the effects of climate change, but also the underlying Earth systems that contribute to climate change.

AP Environmental Science is a popular course. Just over 160,000 U.S. students took the AP exam in 2021, making it the second most popular science course behind AP Biology. Yet, limiting climate education to an AP course, albeit a popular one, is not enough to foster wide-reaching knowledge on the topic. Those 160,000 students who took the APES exam constitute just over 1 percent of all students in American high schools. AP courses are often sought out only by those with a preexisting interest in the subject, and counselors often promote AP course offerings only to high-achieving students. According to the College Board, the organization behind the AP program, only 35% of high schoolers graduating in 2022 took an AP exam during their time in high school.

A further gap arises when you consider that students must pay an exam fee — currently set at $98 — to take the course’s culminating AP exam. While it is possible to take the class without sitting for the AP exam, this financial barrier can disincentivize low-income students from considering the class in the first place. And because students who score highly enough on the course’s AP exam can earn college credit, AP courses appeal to already college-bound students, far from the entirety of American high school students.

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When I spoke with Mr. Heinz — whose first name I learned is Michael — I was pleased that our conversation about climate change in the classroom extended beyond his AP Environmental Science class. He told me that, at the beginning of the 2023-24 school year, an Earth and Space Science course will be implemented into the district-wide curriculum, encompassing both North and our cross-town rival, Downers Grove South.

“We’d have kids that were your best students in biology, chemistry, or physics, but they couldn’t explain why there were tides or why there were seasons,” Heinz said. “We realized that kids, parents, societal members, citizens, whoever they were, they couldn’t understand the nuances of the difference between weather and climate. By bringing this class back, we feel really good about the direction that we’re headed.”

An Earth and Space science class was last offered in the district seven years ago but was reserved as an option for students who didn’t have the math skills needed to take chemistry or physics. Now, the district plans to hold eight different sections of the course on three different tracks: remedial, on-grade, and honors. The Earth and Space Science course will cover the district’s physical science requirement and can be taken during a student’s freshman, sophomore, or junior year. By broadening the curriculum and offering a class that focuses intently on the systems that shape our climate, the school district is ensuring that a greater diversity of students – not just those likely to seek it out on their own – will receive direct education about the most important issue of our time.

After 33 years of teaching, Heinz is two years away from retirement. Despite standing so close to the finish line, his eyes are set on evaluating science education’s place in the future of combating climate change.

In February, Heinz and several retired teachers received a National Science Foundation grant to develop a climate change education conference to be held at North. Slated for March 1, 2024, “The Climate of H.O.P.E. (How Our Planet is Evolving)” centered on developing curriculum about climate change.

“We’re going to have teachers teaching teachers about better ways to teach climate science,” Heinz said. “You asked about the challenges, and some of it is not having the curriculum in place. This will be a way to solve that.”

With less than a year until the planned conference date, Heinz estimates anywhere from 300 to 500 science educators will attend. Featured speakers already on the guest list include Kenneth Miller, the president of the National Center for Science Education, and Mary Albert, a professor at Dartmouth College and executive director of the U.S. Ice Drilling Program.

Many science educators have cited a lack of existing curriculum resources as a primary barrier to teaching about climate change. The National Research Council held the first notable climate change education workshop in 2011, and an informal survey presented there found that 78% of teachers required instructional materials to better implement climate change education in their classrooms. “The Climate of H.O.P.E.” seeks to solve this glaring problem.

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It’s important to realize that in no way were my conversations with teachers and students representative of the state of science education in Illinois, let alone America. Education is rife with inequities, and educational quality often depends simply on how well-funded a school district is. In terms of funding, the two schools I’ve highlighted fall above the national average. Yet, I was left with a sense of hope that, despite all the challenges baked into teaching about a complex, controversial topic, some teachers are working to prepare the next generation for a changing world.

“At my age — I’ll be 54 next week — I’m fine,” Heinz said. “I’m going to be OK. My world isn’t going to change. But what’s gonna happen to my daughters and my grandchildren? It’s existential, but it’s what will my daughters and their families have to deal with. I think it’s important to see that can we get back to a societal good based around confronting climate change.”

About the Author …

Matt Troher graduated from the University of Illinois in May 2023 with a B.A in English and a B.S. in Journalism. He lives in Westmont while reading, writing, running, and working as a due diligence analyst in Chicago.

This piece was written for ESE 498, the CEW capstone course, in Spring 2023.