Field Notes: Teaching Climate Change
An Introduction
Hello. I’m an academic researcher in higher education, and I just launched a new study. It’s a follow-up to a project I did last year called “Worry & Hope: What Students Know, Think, Feel, and Do about Climate Change.” The “Worry & Hope” study revealed pervasive emotions of fear, anger, sadness, shame… and hope among college students across multiple campuses, courses, and levels. Their teachers already knew this. Focus groups with faculty were actually part of the original study, but the obvious conclusion was that we needed to understand much more deeply how college faculty are (or, are not) teaching climate change across academic disciplines. Hence, the Teaching Climate Change study.
Here is a quote that I’ve been thinking about for the last year, from a history professor:
“I’ve spent 25 years being objective in the classroom, not pushing my viewpoint. But I’m really finding it hard because I want to push my viewpoint. It’s too important to be posturing in my ‘academic balance’ when the planet is dying.”
Climate change is more than transdisciplinary; it’s über-disciplinary, a pedagogical game changer that necessitates a complete revisioning of higher education. What does it mean to teach, to be a teacher? How do faculty learn and translate complex information and how does it affect their teaching and disciplinary experise? What pedagogy (or andragogy, or heutagogy) is appropriate? The elevator version of my research question is this: What do college faculty know, think, feel, and do about climate change?
The purpose of the Teaching Climate Change study is to learn about professional development and curricular materials that could help higher education faculty better address the complex psychological and cognitive complexities that accompany learning about climate disruption. Teaching sea level rise is not really what I signed up for, when I was hired twenty years ago to teach many sections of English 100. And yet, these days, what else is there to write about except the climate crisis?
Especially if you are nineteen and doing the new climate math: 1.5 feet by 2050 means a 19 year old college student will be about 50 when the ocean crosses the “blue line” on projection maps. Wait a minute, that’s my house! At the developmental moment when young adults want to make decisions about personal, career, and social roles, the rug of the future is being pulled out from under them. Even if they have been exposed to basic climate science since middle school (part of Common Core learning standards, adopted in 41 U.S. States), they get to college and they’re like “wait, you mean, that’s still happening?” Yes, and it’s much worse than you realized, when you were ten.
It’s not fun. It causes us faculty to become bitter, burned out, doubled-down, depressed. We suffer a particular climate anxiety because it’s not just our own (which we medicate with sarcasm, alcohol, antidepressants, and more and more work) but also the anxiety of our students that we have begun to carry. And we love them, our students. We want them to succeed and meet their life goals…because of that we also have to show them that they will need to adjust their dreams and rethink the future. We are preparing them for something we don’t really comprehend.
I’m saying “we” here, where I should be using “I” statements, which is, again, the point of the study. I wonder how other higher ed faculty are grappling with this? I’m fortunate to include educational research in my official job description, as I wear both a faculty hat and an administrative one. I still teach, but I also coordinate sustainability curriculum at University of the Pacific and Community Colleges of the Pacific*, reporting to a senior administrator in academic affairs. It is my actual job to align and transform curriculum and programs and to understand the perspectives of multiple campus stakeholders. That is so cool, and I’m grateful that our leadership is paying attention. (*Pseudonyms.)
When I was a doctoral student in Educational Administration, I remember my dissertation advisor describing qualitative and quantitative research. She said there are two types of researchers, and you could tell which kind you were inclined to be by noticing what your mind does at an airport. If you are one to notice what percentage of flights are delayed, or how many carry ons exceed allowed area or volume, or the average flight distance (or amount of CO2 emitted, although that example was not so much on our minds, back then), then of course, you are a quantitative researcher. If you are one to imagine where people are going, and why, to engage strangers in conversations and notice the color and condition of luggage tumbling onto the conveyor belt, then you are a qualitative researcher.
Guess which type I am?
I also remember reading about the idea of keeping a field notes blog, which is now called “fieldnotes-in-public” or “live field notes.” The idea is to make the researcher’s observations more transparent, and to engage like-minded researchers, or even your research subjects, in your thinking. Why would I do this with the Teaching Climate Change study? Here are four of my own reasons and why a reader might want to follow the study in my (approximately) weekly blog posts:
- Discipline.
Transcription gets harder with procrastination. Making a commitment to capturing the immediate impressions is good research hygiene and could keep me from falling behind. I have an IRB-approved goal of 60 interviews, which is more than one a week.
2. Seeing the Jewel
I have done two interviews so far. Each of these hour-long conversations brought tears to my eyes. These colleagues of mine are fricken heroes. They are so hardworking and they care about stuff that nobody else even notices. They are so smart; they have academic degrees up the yin-yang. They are great at talking because they have been giving lectures and running meetings for their whole life. They say mind-blowing stuff. Keeping a field notes blog will allow me (pseudonymously, within the bounds of my research protocol, and in full embrace of all my researcher’s biases) to really “see” each interview as the jewel that it is, and to capture the context and “thick description” of each interview. Later, I will chunk them all down in MAXQDA and they will become data. Each interview will be a facet of the analysis. For now, each is a jewel.
3. Currency. This topic is, no pun intended, really hot. Academics and administrators need to better understand this, right now, not in two or three years when I manage to produce a peer reviewed journal article which will be read by 72 people on ResearchGate (a current statistic for a piece I coauthored a few years ago about service-learning). People are interested in this.
Last October at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability (AASHE) conference, I was on a panel with a UW Bothell professor, Jennifer Atkinson, who designed a seminar on Environmental Grief and Climate Anxiety, and another U Dub climate researcher, Judy Twedt, who translates sea ice data into piano compositions (check out her incredible composition, Arctic Sea Ice) so that we can feel them. It was the most packed conference presentation I’ve ever been at, much less presented at. I still get emails from faculty across the country asking for information and ideas and mentoring and what the heck to do.
4. Transparency. Sometimes I stop and I check myself to see if I’m delusional, or subject to some kind of sustainability groupthink. Maybe I have read too many postapocalyptic novels. I asked one of my mentors this question, “Is there any chance that I am wrong, that we are exaggerating the problem with climate change?” and she said, “I can’t answer that for you; you must go and ask the land.”
Guess what the land said? I don’t want to project my own pretraumatic stress syndrome onto others. I don’t want to think someone doesn’t know or care about climate change, to ascribe apathy or ignorance to apparent inaction. Renee Lertzman says that ambivalence is part of the spectrum of responses she calls the 3 As: anxiety, ambivalence, aspiration. Transparency can help me avoid these and the other psycho-cognitive boobytraps of climate change.
Plus, if I’m “putting it out there” then I’m not ping-ponging sentences around in my head all day long, thinking I’m insane (and talking to land). Maybe reader input will help me see an actually helpful new idea for higher education. Educational research is not meant to be a “black box” with conclusions and recommendations that pop out mysteriously at the end. It can be dialogic and open and reflexive.
Qualitative methodology…Let’s try keepin’ it real!
In conclusion, Field Notes: Teaching Climate Change will interest anyone involved in higher education, particularly faculty and the people who care about them. Like I do.
