The Union of the Preposterous: Playfully Engaging with Climate Change
Field Notes: Teaching Climate Change Guest Interview with Casey Meehan
Very few college teachers receive any training in teaching. And very few of the professors that I interview as part of the Teaching Climate Change study actually set out to become educators — there are a lot of “happy accidents” that end up as tenured positions. Why is that? And why do we take something so complex — the human brain, especially during late adolescence — and leave its training to luck? We spend a lot of time and energy in higher education planning and designing “the curriculum” by which technically we mean, the entire student experience, which includes hidden curriculum and latent curriculum and extracurriculum and cocurriculum. But curriculum is basically shorthand for content.(At the end of this piece we will contemplate curriculum as part of an I, Thou, It triad.) And teaching basically means the artful delivery and assessment of that content. 95% of the time in Higher Education, teaching is still basically lecture.
Here are some examples from the 30 interviews conducted so far: Being a Teaching Assistant is a common training for faculty. Said Linda, “The way I taught was a function of the way I was taught. The faculty I was TAing for, I adopted their style and modeled after what I saw and experienced.” Some faculty, like Wren, start out in high schools or elementary schools and discover they prefer the level of discourse at a college level. Some start as tutors in undergrad or grad school, and this 1–1 interaction from a just slightly more advanced level is an excellent training. Said Tom, “I didn’t study pedagogy anywhere at any time, formally, but just seeing the students I would start asking questions, like where are you stuck, and I’d realize what misconception they had, and I’d ask them questions to lead them along to resolving that….seven, eight, nine students a day, the same homework, the same problem, you know where they are getting hung up and it has to do with misconceptions, or a lack of understanding of a certain principle.”
I ask each one of these exemplary teachers in economics, math, and science, whether their students seem to understand climate change. Some, like Delmar, say, “Since I’ve been teaching the past 10 years, students’ awareness of climate change has increased exponentially and their caring about it seems to have gone up.” But, that’s in a geography course and those students may be self-selecting into that course. Caitlyn, who teaches graduate classes in climate policy and planning said, “I would say most of them don’t connect it to social issues until we do it in class. It’s something they’ve heard about but I don’t think they quite get how big this is, ecologically and for humanity, our social systems and our culture. I don’t think they’re there yet.” Art professor, Beth, said, “The students in my intro classes don’t want to be ‘woke’ and if they are, they don’t know what to do. Being awake, but not having a sense of agency….they get so much information that they are just like, “I don’t wanna…” She continues, “In the last few years, students are really different. Checked out from one another….an intense need to not be seen.”
This week I interviewed Casey Meehan, Director for Sustainability at Western Technical College in Wisconsin. Guest interviews offer perspectives from outside my own university system, and from different geographic areas. Casey and I have become professional friends over several years of attending the same conferences, and we both did Ph.D. research on climate education. He remembers learning about climate change as an undergraduate, during the 90s.
“I was such an unserious student as an undergrad. I remember taking it onboard, thinking about it, and thinking ‘this is, like, serious’ but I think I was just young and dumb, I didn’t understand that it was a pressing issue. I don’t think I felt one way or the other about it.
Really it was just “This is what I’m learning and it’s interesting but it was just a science thing to me, at the time. I was more interested in becoming a high school social studies teacher.”
Which he went on to become, but then a curiosity about teaching sent him back to graduate school to study Curriculum & Instruction. He said, “It felt like something was missing in the 15, 16 year old kids I was teaching. Here they were — it was an affluent district, most of my kids had every advantage in the world but they seemed just bored out of the gourd with high school. It got me questioning; what are we doing here, and could we do it better?”
I have been chewing on Casey’s comment for a few days, wondering if it has something to do with the Teenage Brain (remember the cutting edge Frontline series from 2002?). It’s generally held, now, that teenage brains are more plastic, not fully formed. Rearrangement, pruning, and myelinization occur simultaneously. Dan Siegel (2018) proposes that as adolescents discover what they love and are good at, they strengthen some synapses and let others go. He describes an integration that occurs at this age that results from vulnerability and deep connections with others; integration leads to kindness and compassion.
And then, reading Charles Eisentein’s Ascent of Civilization, I read this:
“Up through early adolescence each of a child’s several brains — the reptilian forebrain, the limbic system, and the cerebral cortex — develops in turn, culminating in the development of rational, analytical thought in the early teen years, which we take as the highest form of cognition.”
This is the triune brain that gives us fight, flight, freeze, appease (reptilian brain); the emotions of the limbic system (mammalian brain) and then the critical thinking of the neocortex (neomammalian) that we emphasize in college learning outcomes. Triune brain, here oversimplified, is pretty well understood. But here Eisenstein points to the work of the late James Chilton Pearce “who argues compellingly that there is supposed to be another phase of brain organization in the middle to late teens associated with the prefrontal cortex, whose function is largely a mystery to conventional science, and the neurological dimension of the heart, which conventional science ignores altogether” (Eisenstein, 2007, emphasis added).
So then I have to go read Pearce’s book, The Biology of Trancendence, (and Pearce’s Essential Insights here). where I learn that the Sphinx in Giza (which may be much, much older than previously thought), with its lion body, female breasts, and male head is thought by some to represent the unity of our evolutionary brains…but (check this out!) it is supposed to have a “giant hooded serpent” resting “just above and between the great, gazing eyes of the massive human head beneath” resting on what would be the third eye of the Sphinx. What! Why do I not know this? Maybe because the crowning serpent element, and the nose, were destroyed by some marauders back in the 1300s.
Like four elements combined in the Sphinx, what if there are four brains?Eisenstein suggests that Western culture’s lack of coming of age ceremony (think: vision quest) inhibits the development of the transcendent brain. The fourth element is a second stage of development in the prefrontal cortext, and it is supposed to integrate the brains; to use my favorite Ken Wilber phrase, to include and transcend the triune brain. Pearce thinks this should be a big event, providing new perspectives, but there’s some kind of cultural anticlimax. Eisenstein says it is as if:
“We remain therefore stuck in a perpetual adolescence, waiting our whole lives for some momentous happening that never happens.”
I think of Casey’s curiosity about why his 15 year old students seemed so bored. Eisenstein suggests that a guided transition or ritual is needed to catalyze a “crumbling of the preadolescent world of the discrete and separate self. In the absence of wise elders to implement such a ceremony the world will do it for us, simply because that preadolescent ego world is not sustainable….it inevitably generates converging crises that eventually reveal its fraudulence.” Throw in screen time, social media, and pandemic isolation, and I think that we should be reviewing our adolescent psychology textbooks (Piaget, Erikson, Bronfenbrenner) to better understand college students and this stage of late adolescence — which extends to age 21 — and the secondary prefrontal cortex that should be activated at this time.
Maybe the “retention” and “student success” efforts that we put so much effort into are just late-stage adolescents waiting for the second-level development of their prefrontal cortex, this final layer of transcendence that is latent in the human brain.
Casey Meehan’s research, collected in 2010–2011 explored how climate change was conceptualized in science and social studies curricula across several different types of high schools and content areas. He used the lens of “controversial issues” and studied textbooks to understand how climate change was being taught using Open and Closed questions. Open questions have multiple and competing answers, and closed questions have one definite answer. Casey learned that “over time questions can open or close, or, like, be closed on one side and then open and then be closed on the other side!” (A good example is the question of whether the internment of Japanese-American citizens after WWII was the right thing to do— once taught as a closed “yes” in the 1960s, it later became an open question, and is now closed again, as a “no”).
With climate change, the questions Casey found in the high school textbooks were:
- Is it happening (basically closed, in favor of the scientific consensus of Yes, it is happening);
- Why is it happening (“very much open,” according to Casey, on the matter of whether and to what degree climate change is human-caused); and then lastly;
- “what to do about it” which is treated as a closed question.
“My big finding was that those should be flip-flopped. We know what’s causing climate change. The open question should be: what do we do about it. The way the textbooks answered it was like, ten simple steps: turn off the lights, walk more, that sort of thing, and they fail to say anything about the role of business or government. There’s a conundrum, in that teachers were being told to teach one question that’s really closed, they were told to teach it as open, and the question that we need to be deliberating, they focused on that being closed. That was the finding.”
So, let’s think about that as a general baseline learned in high school. Maybe some students find the open question, become “woke” to the topic and go to college specifically to learn more: they become environmental studies majors and student activists. Others accept the closed question, swallow a certain degree of cognitive dissonance and guilt, or maybe become a vegetarian for a while and then try to go on with their lives. In my experience, they come to college and they don’t seem to know what they know.
Meehan presented one of the standout sessions at October’s Global Conference on Sustainability in Higher Education (#GCSE). His video session, from which I stole the title for this essay (with his permission, and because it was just so awesome) “Union of the Preposterous: Engaging Playfully with Climate Change” focused on a pedagogy of Play, or Playfulness to engage with climate change. He told me how it came about:
“In my role I do a lot of climate talks with various groups — businesses, nonprofits, civic groups, different groups of students. After about a year of doing that — I mean, it’s a great privilege to be able to talk to pelple about climate change, and I love it, but after about a year I found myself grossed out by it. I felt awful after ever single talk I gave….It’s just a list of how the world’s going to hell in a handbasket and even these individual solutions are not enough, not gonna do it. I would just feel really bad after each talk and I can only imagine how bad my audience was feeling and how turned off they would have been.”
So he made little pirate ships using two corks and a mast made of the Climate Warming Stripes (which Casey sees as a “playful” depiction of climate data).
The ships bear a message “Arr, here thar be global warming!” and they also have a QRC code for the ship-finders to scan to learn more, and to participate in information and discussion. In the #GSHE session, Meehan proposed that Playfulness is a universal way of human interaction, and builds skills that we want to see in climate education. Play is pleasurable, spontaneous, fully present, voluntary, and fluid. Playfulness can:
- Open up creativity;
- Support ability to navigate uncertainty;
- Help us handle worry;
- Connect us with others’
- Allow us to practice being brave.
Meehan also cites the work of Ian Bogost, author of Play Anything.
Bogost coined a term, Worldfulness, which is the outward-facing equivalent of Mindfulness. “Living playfully,” says Bogost, “isn’t about you. It’s about everything else, and what you manage to do with it.
So what does Playfulness and Worldfulness mean to a college educator?
Casey says, “The content (about climate change) is out there for anyone. I mean, we see it when we look out the window now. If we think of our jobs as conveying the content to somebody; shoot! I can do that with my phone. I can find out anything I need to know about climate change. But what I can’t do is explain how somebody in the field can think about that or how somebody in business can think about that. It’s about helping to teach people how experts think.”
One of my main arguments, and the basis behind a faculty workshop that I teach called Teaching Climate Change Affectively, is that without engagement of the emotional brain, learning about climate crisis is short circuited by our cognitive defenses. We need the heart-brain. Meehan adds that learning also doesn’t happen when we are stressed — that’s the reptile brain. “When the amygdala is firing its hard to get deeper than thoughts other than fight or flight. I think we ought to try to do is ratchet down that stress when we are talking about climate change. I feel the stress inherently, but I don’t want to put that stress on students — or on my young kiddos. That’s for me to hold.”
So — Play! Meehan suggests creating surprise in your content, and spontaneity. “Present your data in a way that is surprising. That’s a first step. I love the warming stripes, it’s a cool way of showing that data that people aren’t expecting.” We also talked about a climate installation in Chicago, which consisted of the sound of melting ice projected in slow motion over Daly park. Or the piano composition, Arctic Ice. (other Playful interactions with climate change, I’d love to hear about them!)
I’ll conclude with one more big concept, for the concept of pedagogy (or, more appropriately, andragogy, or heutagogy) and curriculum in higher education. Like so many awesome theories, it comes in a triad: I, thou, it.
Citing work from husband and wife team, Hawkins and Hawkins (1967) Casey describes:
I is the teacher, thou is the students, and the ‘it’ is the curriculum — in the college classroom, the “it” is the content. Think about about the I/thou/it in your classroom — is one line thicker? Is it even a triangle for you? what does that look like? If we think about college teaching, in general the line between I, the professor and it, the curriculum, is usually really strong. But the connection between I and thou, maybe not so strong, and if it’s a large lecture maybe it’s nonexistent. We are expecting students to pick up the thou to It line on their own. And that doesn’t happen. This idea of play, or ‘messing about’ is one way to help that happen.
