Course Background & Focus

The global climate continues to dramatically change as the result of human activity—with an expanding range of devastating effects around the world (e.g., mega-fires, increased frequency and intensity of hurricanes, widespread flooding, extended droughts and desertification). Working through consensus reports, scientists have argued that societies disproportionately impacting climate, like ours, have at most 10 years to make massive and unprecedented changes to our global energy infrastructure to limit the ill effects of climate change to moderate levels.

Education becomes a crucial context to support societal transformation towards harm reduction, ecological flourishing, and social justice. The climate change movement—including any associated justice-focused engagement through education—needs to intersect directly with the promotion of racial justice, Indigenous sovereignty, economic justice, robust civic participation, and community self-determination and resilience.

In this graduate seminar, the group is self-organizing to explore such issues as:

• How can the ‘arts of living on a damaged planet’ become central to education (e.g., through place-based science education)?

• How does systemic racism impact human and more-than-human communities in entangled ways—and how can we focus education on its disruption and on promoting more just, thriving, and self-determined futures within impacted communities?

• How can education help disrupt human supremacy as the prevailing societal frame and shift understanding towards caring for multispecies communities?

• How can non-Natives come to understand the foundational importance of Indigenous systems of knowledge and responsibility and the vital role of Indigenous leaders for guiding responses to climate and environmental concerns?

• How can we disrupt white imaginaries within discussions and curricula about how we collectively respond to climate change and instead focus on just and thriving BIPOC futurities?

• Can justice-centered investigations help students understand how to protect the critical ecological infrastructures that support human and more-than-human relations while mobilizing to resist invasive infrastructures that imperil them?

Course Approach

The participants in this course will explore select readings like those linked above along with the following anchor texts:

• Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and The Teachings Of Plants by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer

• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Dr. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene by Drs. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (eds.)

Additionally, participants in the course will explore personally meaningful, local projects of significance to them and their communities (in ways that are safely possible at this time). There are many ways to engage these matters through education. One entry point will be the context of PK-12 science and engineering education—as represented in the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education and resulting standards-based initiatives focused on climate science education. For example, over the past two years the statewide ClimeTime network has helped thousands of teachers (8,000 teachers in year 1 and 6,800 teachers in year 2) across Washington state learn to teach about climate change and climate justice through science education. Students will be encouraged to explore that kind of effort and a range of educational strategies and models for promoting environmental and climate justice (e.g., youth climate action / social movements, outdoor school, community-governed resilience projects [e.g., on food sovereignty], social studies education, field investigations, regenerative design, reciprocal ecological restoration projects, etc.).