Where Are We Taking Our Students? (Wren, Applied Mathematics, #26)
Field Notes: Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education
I know two people who practice Inbox Zero with devotion. Each of them, I admire: one is the School Leader at a sustainability charter school; the other, Executive Director of an ocean nonprofit. These women get things done. They post about Inbox Zero sometimes on Facebook when they knock out a particular number of emails from their inbox, or when they maintain their ‘zero’ for a particular period of time. I can see how it would be very satisfying. I am always interested in methods for better time and media hygeine.
Here are a few essential practices that I use or aspire to:
- Check email at set times. (not every ten minutes)
- Turn off notificiations on phone and email. (If you do one thing, do this)
- Don’t click through anything on social media. (Don’t feed the algorithm)
- Remove Facebook from your phone. (Ideally I would only check twice weekly, and of course I know all the reasons to leave Facebook altogether)
- Unsubscribe from things I don’t read; batch delete them. (I sometimes work on this while listening to webinars.)
- Use a consistent naming system for your own subject lines. This will help you find them later.
At the moment, I have 20,685 emails in my inbox. (And 16,047 in my personal email account). My personal inbox goes back to Oct 2, 2008, an email about the closing of the Keiki Club at my gym. Aunty Jean, who was Samoan, used to watch my younger daughter, V, while I worked out (or more often, took a nap). True story: Aunty Jean fed V her first solid food — poi. I can’t delete Aunty Jean!
The oldest email in my work inbox is from 2007. It is about the online professional development program, Scenarios, an awesome project I worked on back in the day. True story: Scenarios is the only time I ever wrote in Hawaiian Creole English (aka pidgin), and I was lucky to have Da Pidgin Guerilla in the office next door; he kindly edited and encouraged my efforts.
Even further back in the day, when I was 21, I worked at a publishing company in San Francisco and I remember the (paper) memo we received when email was brand new; the memo told us which things to use email for, and the proper tone and salutations (early netiquette was much more formal). I remember working out when and whom to cc (I also remember carbon copies, of course) and the perils of BCC.
Everybody has a good story about a misdirected email (whether you are the mortified sender or the surprised recipient). Like, for example, recently, when I was accidentally cc’ed in an email about myself. It said that I was “more of an activist than a scholar”. I mean, it’s not exactly an insult but, what does that even mean?
Anyway, my gigantic inbox came in handy today when I was feeling these nostalgic thoughts, like thinking about Learning Communities. Every college has gotten excited about learning communities at some point, and most have failed, except of course for Evergreen College, which is designed around learning communities. I was trying to remember what year it was when we had a grant to host some excellent trainers from Evergreen to help our faculty do interdisciplinary work.
In our program, faculty would go through the training with their teaching partner. You would get a course release the first time you taught the new course (because it’s hard, and takes twice as much time) and then bank one credit every subsequent semester that you taught it. You could save up and and cash that out for a course release every year and half, giving you a little breather to rest, and to retool the course. At one point we had about 30 learning community courses on the books — even a triple LC focused on Water; I think it was Psychology, Biology, and Art. We had one that was remedial math and remedial composition: students would take both courses, become a cohort and connect material across the two courses. They wrote essays about their Math Anxiety. It was like taking a class with your right brain and your left brain at the same time.
I found this email, from January 2008, to my friend, Dr. K, a conservation biologist: “Hey, just a random thought popping into my head….would you like to talk about forming a learning community with your class and an ENG 100?”
It took a few years to get from that ‘random thought’ to the Learning Community course Decade Zero: Understanding the Rhetoric and Science of Climate Change. (Naomi Klein used the term “Decade Zero” in 2014, This Changes Everything, which by my simple math means we have just four years left before as Klein said, “everything changes, one way or another.”) We were on the right track. In the Decade Zero course, I taught ENG 100 and Dr. K. taught Ecology 101 with a field-based lab that involved removing tons of invasive algae at a nonprofit partner. (That algae was studied in undergraduate research projects to turn it into fertilizer.)
There are three blonde professors at the college, and Dr. K and I are two of them. We inhabited each other’s classes and came to know each other’s minds. Too often, we would end up wearing the same color shirt and it became a joke like “oh I see you got the purple memo.” Students frequently came to my office hours — to ask about the homework for Ecology. I learned about the Earth’s Energy Balance the same way that the students learned it, by drawing it. Then in my class, the students had to share their drawings with family members, and analyze their responses: what they knew, didn’t know, their resistances, what they cared most about. Always begin from a common connection, I taught them. Everybody cares about something.
Dr. K. had had Flight Behavior on her bedside table for a year, she said. So I put her in a Literature Circle (I call them book clubs) with three young women. Two of them went on to became Sustainability majors. Was it identification with Kingsolver’s protagonist, Dellarobia (named for a type of Christmas wreath) or with Dr. K., or a combination of both? Flight Behavior is a story about ecology and butterflies but also religion, community colleges, and the beauty of science.
Dr. K and I used the double block of time to take the students on field trips, sometimes pushing the limits of the campus liability waivers (and student endurance for walking in the hot sun). I said things like: “you cannot study climate change in an air conditioned classroom!” We even wrote a book chapter about the course for a publication on service learning. We presented at AESS in 2015, and did some amazing course design work while riding rented bicycles in San Diego.
We were really into it.
I feel sad thinking about Decade Zero, which we only taught three, maybe four times. We tried to tweak it and make it easier, less time consuming especially for Dr. K. who has multiple preps and labs and says just updating her courses takes forever every year, since the science changes so quickly. (Aside from updates to APA and MLA, this is less of a problem in teaching writing, though I redesign over the summers.) Did I mention the 27 credit teaching load at our community colleges — 5 in fall and 4 in spring (5/4) compared to an average university load of (3/2) or even, at places like Yale, (1/1) — to allow for scholarship (though not, I guess, for activism).
Why have Learning Communities, a much touted, much loved, and very effective High Impact Practice, largely failed? (And while I’m at it, where has professional development gone and is it ever coming back? No more conferences, no more travel…no stipends, incentives, or banked course releases. In fact, how about a pay cut or a furlough instead?). I know there still places where faculty are supported and given spaces and opportunities to think, to reconsider, to mull over. To get to know each other, and to teach as part of a community. But they are becoming rare.
I think workload is the main barrier to interdisciplinary courses, but schedules, registration, and other bureaucratic beasts just make it too hard to maintain. The only way to manage a 5/4 teaching load is to use powerpoint lectures and a midterm and final exam. (Either that, or wine.)
In a 2001 article about learning communities, AAC&U wrote:
“Across the nation we see persistent weaknesses in terms of leadership structures, resource investments, faculty development, real curriculum integration, assessment, and pedagogical change.”
The history of learning communities, and my love story about teaching in one, goes back to the 1920s and the Meiklejohn experiment at the University of Wisconsin. It’s probably still the best idea I could come up with for teaching climate change: a residential learning community that isn’t made up of tiny boxes and Carnegie credit hours and points and grades…all of which kill the joy of teaching.
It is also one of my dream ideas for our campuses in the University of the Pacific (UoP) system (a pseudonym). Take a core group of interdisciplinary faculty, a common cohort of students; a built environment that the students live in, with a garden, and solar/wind power. And just let them do stuff.
I was fortunate to see an amazing installation at the Centre de Cultura de Contemporània Barcelona (CCCB) called After the End of the World. My favorite exhibit (of course) was a London apartment in the year 2050 designed by (my hero) Kim Stanley Robinson. The details were like ideas made real. You could sit on the sofa and read the headlines in a future newspaper. There were recipies for worm-based proteins in the kitchen and microgreens growing in a pantry. It was recognizable, but different. It was like inhabiting your own imagination of a near-future collapse scenario. (I found an awesome short video of the installation, here.)
This week in the Teaching Climate Change study I interviewed Wren (a pseudonym), who teaches math at a four year comprehensive university in the UoP system. She has a BA, MS, and Ph.D. in Math and is involved in Rate of Change research in climate models. (In other words, she is a scholar of math, not just a math activist.) She and I talked about learning communities — she had done the training, too, but the grant and the energy ran out.
She said:
“In getting our students to do something, you get them to understand what climate change is. I think success would be our students being able to talk about climate change and being able to use the data and communicate even with just their peers in a way that is based on science. I think maybe that would probably be the first thing, if I re-examine myself and my lessons, that would be the #1 goal. And the application of the math theory would be second.”
Her class could be this way, but: how do you assess communication? Wren talked about patterns in the historic data from Mauna Loa: temperature data since 1900, CO2 since 1950. She asks her students, “If you are looking at the rate of change from 1900 to 1950 and compare that to the last 20 years what are the differences, can you see a trend?” She said: “Being able to connect the data and the assignments in the classroom and then somewhere where students can see it, that was an important entry for me.” Before Covid, she gave traditional paper exams. Now, she uses Zoom and has them talk to each other and record video interviews about math. (In other words, Covid-induced creativity has moved her towards this idea of assessing math through communication.)
I also use data where you see the prehistoric data from the bubbles and the ice bore, you have weather stations in the ice and you can see the difference in slope, how the trend goes here and then it goes like that — the hockey stick, right?
Some of the students are like ‘Wow that’s 100 times faster than it was before’ .
I’m like, yup, that’s it.
She said this is where she needs help. “That’s where I stop. How do I move forward to become an action? Do I tell them to call their congresspeople?”
In other words, you drop this data set on them, and then what? (Or as another colleague, Tom, put it: “you can’t just be like, ‘okay, see you guys later!’”) How do you deal with the ensuing pre traumatic stress, climate anxiety, and solastalgia? Or with the denial and resistance strategies that are so highly normalized? Wren continued:
I was a little bit stupid when I started and now I’m still open but a little less stupid. Back then, I didn’t think about assessment. I thought it was boring and like, ‘lets just create math’, but here seven years later I think “where are we taking our students?” we give them this data and then, what? What’s the route? Where do I end?
Willow is an ocean paddler and she says that teaching is like being a steersman, who sits at the back of a six person canoe.
“As a teacher I’m the steersman. I’m guiding where the canoe is going, there’s water going in all directions, you’ve got to know where you’re going. You’ve got to go from point A to point B and how do you get there? You know what your students, your paddlers, are doing and encourage them, but you also make some correction, you know, and the steersman sits in the back and they can see the course and as a teacher you sort of have to sit in the back and see the course, where your students are going and where your course is going, but the point of assessment is where we want to take the students, that’s something that probably, as far as teaching climate change, I would have to think first: What do I want to get out of this for my students? We need to get there, and stop. There has been a time where we have to go paddle and the leaders didn’t say where we are going to stop and it’s not very clear where the direction is and people were just wondering, are we stopping now? Are we going to go 5 more minutes? And everybody’s tired, so having a clear pathway of the route is very important.”
Here’s another scary math thought that I came across, some research on what is called Motivated Numeracy. It was ‘only’ an MA thesis (part scholarship, part activism, I guess) but the Australian researchers found that: “When we showed people reports about CO₂ emissions, the more numerate people were much more politically polarised than any other group. …. In fact, more numerate people may be better at doing this because they are have more skills to rationalise their own beliefs in the face of contradictory evidence.”
Teaching math in a box doesn’t work. But just think if math were applied to something…something big, something important, something existential even, then math bestows clarity and purpose. Dr. K. always says that when students know the science of climate change they think it’s just so easy. Like, duh, don’t cut down the forest. Plant trees. Keep it in the ground.
Or, you could think of it this way: E = R × U = p × D × τ / T
(Known as the Schnellenhuber equation, here “We define (E) as the product of risk and urgency. Risk (R) is defined by insurers as probability (p) multiplied by damage (D). Urgency (U) is defined in emergency situations as reaction time to an alert (τ) divided by the intervention time left to avoid a bad outcome (T)”.)
We were too busy for learning communities. Are we too busy to save the planet?
