Advice to Faculty for when Climate Change Falls its Ash on Your Head
Talking with Mark Stemen about professional development in the Teaching Climate Change and Resilience learning community
I’m trying to bring the Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education study to some type of a close. Perhaps a conclusion about the changing faculty role, or some recommendations about how to better support faculty as climate educators. My RQ was: “what makes some faculty become such great climate educators, while others just keep teaching the same syllabus as if we had the same future we thought we had?
Speaking for myself, I was taught absolutely nothing about climate change in my entire undergraduate (University of Iowa, 1992) and master’s degrees (San Francisco State, 1996). My climate epiphany happened in 2002, and then in 2005 when I went to do my PhD research on “what college students know, think, feel, and do about climate change” I was told, by my dissertation advisor in Educational Psychology that it would be too hard to convince my committee that climate change was real. This is my story. Every one of the 75 faculty I interviewed for this study since 2020 has their story. And that’s what the blog is about.
I switched doctoral programs and did a few more years of coursework in Educational Administration, which turned out to be great preparation for the work I’m doing now, while on professional leave of absence to serve as as Senior Advisor for Sustainability Education with Global Council for Science and the Environment. I did do that research project that was rejected, first in 2009 and again, with Matthew Lynch, in 2018, listening to students and documenting what we now refer to as climate anxiety, the affective side effects of fear, anger, sadness, shame, and hope.
Have you heard about this term, institutional betrayal? Coined by psychologist Jennifer Freyd, institutional betrayal usually has more to do with how racism, sexual assault, and other issues are handled. But I recently met with an Master’s student in psychology who was inspired by the Worry & Hope paper to study institutional betrayal in the context of climate education — how students feel “let down” by courses and programs that are missing the mark in preparing them for the climate-changed future. It’s really not about doomers and hopium anymore; it’s about remaining relevant.)
Most of my colleagues just think that climate change isn’t in their wheelhouse. I get it. We are trained to be experts and to respect expertise, so we have left this messy hyperobject to our friends in the environmental studies and geography departments. I say “we” because, hey, I’m just an English professor, so what do I know about climate change? Well, it turns out, enough: I teach reading, research, analysis and rhetoric (and, of course, the Ultimate Cli Fi Book Club). These are all highly relevant. We used to teach “media literacy” but now it’s called “Sensemaking”; how to think in an information ecology that is broken. It’s simply become impossible to ignore that climate change (Overshoot, the Predicament, the Fifth Extinction, all of it) is everybody’s discipline.
This is the main point that Mark Stemen makes in the CSU intercampus program, Teaching Climate Change and Resilience Faculty Learning Community. “We need all hands on deck and all lecterns on deck,” he says. Mark and I met at a SENCER conference at Harvey Mudd on Broadening Paricipation in Undergraduate Climate Education, where our workshop sessions were scheduled in the same time slot: funny, because we are like parallel universes of each other.
Professional doppelgängers, as it were.
This essay is about my conversation with Mark. I’m also writing it down to think out loud about the Teaching Climate Change study, since Mark invited me as a guest speaker for the CSU program in April — a real honor.
Academic Freedom and Sustaining Excellence
I decided to track down my own teaching contract and the Faculty Classification Plan that provides a scaffold of expectations for the complex autonomy of teaching faculty. Most people know that faculty work is usually comprised of teaching, research, professional development, and service to one’s department, college, and community. I was pondering the weird workload of post-tenure faculty and looking for the part in the contract about “maintaining currency in one’s discipline”. I knew about this:
“Faculty are expected to sustain the excellence that contributed to their tenure and to continue developing their skills as professionals and leaders in their college and community.
But I don’t think I’d ever read this next paragraph:
“This classification plan also recognizes, however, that at different stages in a faculty member’s career, responsibilities and emphases may change in response to the needs of the college, the nature of its community, the availability of opportunities, and the evolution of individual professional interests and expertise. Faculty are challenged, therefore, to follow multiple paths in the performance of their responsibilities.”
Wow! My contract actually stipulates that I should follow my own path. My contact states that my responsibilities and emphases may change in response to the “nature of its community” (and, I would add, the community of its nature).
The flip side of this contract is the autonomy, self-governance, and academic freedom that accompanies these big responsibilities. Maintaining currency and the agreement to “sustain excellence” is what’s on the flip side of academic freedom. Think about how these are related. In order to keep academic freedoms, we have to maintain currency; and in order to maintain currency, we must keep, and utilize, academic freedoms. (Again, a topic massively beyond the scope of this essay, but one that I hope PEN America is working on — ensuring climate freedom of speech as another example of what could happen if despotic trends like the Stop W.O.K.E act continue.)
Even though, according to a recent University of Michigan study using AI methods, 15% of Americans currently deny that climate change is real, I think what happens with faculty and climate change is self-censorship. Despite my graduate advisor’s advice, for the most part nobody is telling us not to talk about climate change. We have silenced ourselves, because it’s just easier not to talk about it. You don’t have to go all Jem Bendell to start sticking out as one of the “green people” and I’ll tell you it comes with a lot of extra work and baggage to be one of the green people.
Instead of sticking out, we need to be sticking together.
And on the other hand, nobody is really helping us understand what and how to teach in order to prepare students to meet and solve the challenges that they will face in their future (and their now). A few years ago I just started following Univeristy of Hawai’i coastal geographer Chip Fletcher around (like a really nerdy groupie or maybe some kind of climate information sadist). I felt like I had to hear this talk over and over and over until one day Chip turned to me and said, “you know, Krista, you can deliver this powerpoint yourself now.” Dr. Fletcher and I are on a team now, together, we are trusted messengers, as in my favorite climate communciation mantra:
consistent message, frequently delivered, by a trusted messenger.
It’s a choice you make, to step in to the role of being a climate communicator, a climate sensemaker. And this team is all there is: there are no experts, no playbook, and none of us really knows how it’s going to play out. As Mark says, “it’s all hands on deck, and all lecterns on deck.”
Mark came out of the Humanities, as a historian. His Master’s is in 19th century history and his PhD focused on 20th century history. His dissertation was about cotton production in California. He said,
“Climate change has forced me to leave my field, no longer thinking about the past but thinking about the future and what’s to come.”
This is such a quantum statement, don’t you think? History is changed by the future. After cotton, he studied water and agriculture in the American West. He was hired in the geography department at Chico State in the early aughts to start an environmental studies program. He said,
“Environmental history is about how humans shape the environment and also how the environment shapes humans, this unappreciated impact that we have changed our culture enormously to fit the environment and we could probably do it again.”
I interviewed another environmental historian in the Teaching Climate Change series (“Zach: Unpacking Nature is no Walk in the Park”) Zach (a pseudonym) summed up the climate situation like this: “it doesn’t look good, but we don’t know.” An oddly comforting uncertainty. Mark described the field this way:
“Environmental history is about how humans shape the environment and also how the environment shapes humans, this unappreciated impact that we have changed our culture enormously to fit the environment and we could probably do it again.”
So Mark and I are just talking shop about teaching and he starts telling me about a seminar he was teaching in 2018 on climate forecasting (a historian teaching forecasting, I love that!). We are just talking on Zoom he stops and he pauses, looks into my zoom-eyes and says: Camp Fire.
“That’s what really got us. We lost an entire town in one morning,”
he said of the 2018 Camp Fire which destroyed the town of Paradise, CA.
“The town was gone. All of that disruption. We had class (the climate forecasting seminar) on Wednesday night and It happened on a Thursday morning and when we came back to class three weeks later, we realized that we had actually forecast the Camp Fire. But what actually happened was 10x bigger than what we had forecast and ten years sooner than we had predicted. It was a huge wake up call.”
One of Mark’s students said,
“I always knew climate change was this thing,
but it became real when the town next to me started falling its ash on my head.”
Mark continued: “The students came back to school saying, why are we not talking about this? Why are we not talking about this in every class that we take? They started asking questions, in every class they took and that really rattled the faculty because they didn’t know what they were supposed to talk about, or how to talk about climate change, in these other classes. The students actually voted that climate change should be taught in every field of study, and the university heard that.”
The California State University Sustainability Policy today has 11 sections (A-K) and leads with a commitment to academics:
The CSU will seek to further integrate sustainability and climate literacy into the academic curriculum working within the normal campus consultative process. Activities can include but will not be limited to supporting multi-disciplinary course development, utilizing the campus as a living laboratory model, connecting sustainability with social justice, strengthening community partnerships, and creating appropriate learning outcomes.
Keep in mind that the CSU system has 23 campuses and 460,000 students and 53,000 faculty and staff. This policy is designed to turn a very large ship.
Some other things I like about the CSU system policy is that, in addition to carbon reduction targets (CSU aims for carbon neutrality by 2045 aligned with California state policies); water conservation targets (also aligned to California state policy); promoting circular economies; promoting biodiversity and preserving native landscapes on campus; it also stipulates the designation of a sustainability officer or staff with responsibility for program efforts AND requires every campus to do AASHE STARS reporting. The policy is comprehensive, detailed, clear, and ambitious but aligned.
A policy is just words, but STARS reporting is data, and to require that reporting is a really big deal. As Mark put it, “STARS is a way to share information and it holds each campus accountable. Even if not every campus is going for Gold they do have to report. It makes every administrator say what they did that year, because there’s a form and you can’t leave anything blank.”
From Big Tent to Hub
I want to share just one more part of my interview with Mark Stemen.
He’s telling me about the faculty conference, This way to Sustainability, that he held for 17 years, and about how they have changed some of their language from sustainability to climate change to resilience, and how he’s gotten more focused on solutions. We talk about some of his favorite teaching materials which include All We can Save (“the website is huge and great”) and Project Drawdown (“has a huge video and graphics library I can use”) and the Solutions Journalism Network (“I start every class with a solution and SJN is the reason I can do that!). He especially loves the SJN,
“Whatever I’m thinking about or teaching I can type it in and they can link me to articles that are close to that, so I can talk about cutting edge stuff that is happening right now for my students who are looking for something in the future.”
Sustainability in Higher Education has been all about making a Big Tent for Sustainability. Mark pointed out that the Big Tent doesn’t give you tenure or promotion. All the things that matter most to faculty are not housed in the Center for Sustainability, but back in their department.
“It was a big enough tent or at least a big enough poncho, but faculty had to leave their other tent, and we’ve never had all areas of study represented. And with the budget cuts that are coming, we can’t really make a bigger tent any more, there’s not enough tent material, and in fact the tent is the first thing that gets folded when things have to go.”
The updated focus of the learning community is teaching climate change and resilience across all disciplines.
“It’s different because we are based now in professional development. We are calling it The Hub, because that implies spokes that have to go back to the existing rim. We aren’t going to reinvent the wheel in higher ed and, I mean, the wheel is pretty good, we just have to give it better connections and better structure.”
We are going to get to the heart of education, which is faculty development, and radiate out from there. That’s the heart of the work of the system. — Mark Stemen
This systemwide model for the Teaching Climate Change and Resilience learning community grew out of decades of work, and was influenced by internal factors like an intentional shift to teaching solutions or focusing more on climate change than sustainability, as well as external factors, like Covid, and budget cuts. It’s been influenced by Zoom and the ability to have more guest speakers in a shorter time. It was influenced by policy, and student agency…and by the ash of the Camp Fire falling on their heads.
My favorite question in the Teaching Climate Change interviews is about the metaphors that faculty use when talking about their own climate epiphanies or process of becoming a climate educator. I didn’t even have to ask this question because Mark had already used the metaphors of the Big Tent, and the Hub, the Ship, and the Wheel and Spoke. He used one more metaphor, which I’ve been pondering since we spoke and which I hope you will take a moment to think about as well.
Mark described the moment when he realized that some of the sustainability work that we’ve all been doing on college campuses might not be enough or maybe…it isn’t working. It’s a very uncomfortable thought when so much good work is happening. Mark and I could talk about teaching climate change literally all day, and every day, but I knew exactly what he was talking about when he brought up the moment of silence that happens inside you when he says…
“And then along came David Orr…”.
Mark saw Orr speak at a conference (I was proabably also in the room, though Orr has given a lot of talks) and he paraphrased Orr’s comments (which I think look quite nice laid out as a poem):
“He reminded all us sustainability people that, as awesome as our campus projects were, we are all on a train headed south to certain destruction.
It’s not a rapid death, but its certain.
It’s coming, and here it comes.
Some of us recognize the danger so we start walking north inside the train.
We go from car to car congratulating ourself on how many cars we’ve done and how much progress we’ve made,
but if we look out the train cars we are further south than when we started.
And we really need to get this train going in a different direction.”
[I can’t help thinking about the film Snowpiercer here, because it would be so great if we could just get off the train, but there’s no getting off the train and you might be eating cockroaches sooner than you think.]
In his book, Hope is an Imperative, Professor Orr credits Peter Montague with the train story, which Montague published in an essay titled “Some Guiding Principles: WWIII Pt. 4” in Rachel’s Environment and Health Weekly, in 1997 (I highly recommend reading the full essay which is full of great things I wish had happened).
Montague told it like this:
“Here is our situation. We are all passengers (or crew) on a long rickety train heading south at 40 miles per hour, not rushing toward doom but steadily chugging southward toward general environmental and social destruction. Many of us are alert to the dangers and for several years we have been earnestly walking north inside the train.
As we plod from train car to train car we stop to congratulate ourselves on our progress. We slap each other on the back or we hug, and we recount the many train-cars we have managed to pass through, thanks to our stubborn persistence.
But if we would only pause to look out the window, we could all plainly see that we are now further south than we were when we last stopped to congratulate ourselves on our progress. Despite our best efforts, we have been unable to reverse the direction of travel. We are all being carried southward against our will, deeply violating our sense of justice.
Maybe this is happening to us because we have spent our time engaging the conductor in conversation. This seems like the natural thing to do. After all, it is the conductor who sets and enforces the rules inside the train — that’s what conductors do. Furthermore, the conductor seems pleasant and intelligent, and he also seems genuinely interested in helping us make our way north through the train. He keeps emphasizing how well we are doing, and, when we become discouraged, he urges us on, reminding us that walking northward is a noble journey, and that eventually we will get to the promised place.
Unfortunately, it has been many years since we asked ourselves the fundamental questions: what fuels the locomotive? Who is the engineer with his hand on the throttle? And what will it take to make him change direction?”
Mark’s work has been covered by The Chronicle of Higher Education, in the excellent article, “The Climate Conscious College”. The award-winning professional learning community has been written about in the CSU system newsletter, “2023 AASCU award recognizes the work of CSU multi-campus faculty learning community in teaching climate change” and in the Chico State newsletter: “California State University Honored with Innovation Award for Faculty Learning Community Led by Chico State Professor.” You can learn more about the model at the CSU Chico Office of Faculty Development website, or in this Case Study for replication which you can find at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.
New here? There are many faculty stories in the Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education series. Here are a few that might pair well with this one: Professional Development, “Is that So? Professional Development, Equanimity, and the Life Path of Faculty” Conservation Biology “It Needs to Be Done and Here I Am”, Geography “Climate Change as a Supertask” and the interview with Zach, the Environmental Historian, “Unpacking Nature is no Walk in the Park”.
Postscript
Mark has made the Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education blog an assigned reading for participants in the CSU professional learning community. He said, “when faculty say, ‘I can’t do this, it doesn’t fit in my course’,” he sends them right here, to this very blog, and tells them “You can find yourself in these interviews.” Wow, that is so cool. He gave me a really nice compliment and some advice on my research conclusions:
“What’s so powerful about your Teaching Climate Change blog is the variety of people you’ve talked to (and some of the dark caves you’ve gone into). It would be sad if you found some kind of formula that was A, B, and C…what you say here is that every letter is somewhere and you have all that diversity. It’s not about distilling; it’s about that richness in teaching that is really worth sharing.”
