Teachers Notes

As teachers, teaching about climate change, how do we reach students who are feeling scared and overwhelmed by our changing climate and who may believe that there is little they can do to make a difference? How can we help young people address feelings of hopelessness, move beyond any despair to a more constructive, positive place?

Keren Bromberg and Rebecca Niblett in their teacher’s guide, Teaching Hope for Action: A Facilitator’s Guide to Creating Action in Environmental Education, offer a comprehensive array of activities to help teachers help students, activities that bring critical hope to teaching about climate change.

It is becoming clearly apparent to all who care to see that significant actions are needed if the living systems of Earth are to survive in the rich, complex diversity on which human societies depend. With this manual, Rebecca Niblett and Keren Bromberg have chosen to take on a challenging—and critically important—endeavour. Their effort is to design a method and test processes for an environmental education that not only informs participants about issues, ideas and resources but also empowers them to constructive action toward the well-being of Earth.

The curricula presented by Bromberg and Niblett are designed with this learner, the whole human being, in mind. The popular education model lends a frame in which participants can gain a sense of effective personal agency as they see their knowledge and opinions contribute to others’ learning. Power relationships are made explicit and feedback of all members is welcomed, so that all can share democratically in constructing meaning; thus a larger system, a learning collectivity, organizes itself and participants experience a widening of their identity. Activities create structured opportunity for respectful attention to emotions, such as empathic pain, fear, anger, or numbing, that often accompany awareness of the dangers to Earth’s integrity and the suffering of living beings. In taking part, group members can acknowledge these hurts and experience their deeper meaning, that of their own deep connection to all beings.