Effective ways to teach students about climate change

Helping students to understand climate change and propelling them to take action on climate change is one of the biggest challenges we are faced with today. Why is climate change such a difficult issue to understand? Listed below are some explanations.

It’s complex: Understanding climate change involves grasping a number of concepts that are separated in time and space. For example, an increase in greenhouse gases in one part of the world leads to changes in climate that arise many years later and often many kilometres away from the initial emissions. This conflicts with the tendency students have to want to make simplifying assumptions and search for causes that are close by in location and time to the effects.

It has no single cause: When thinking about a problem, students typically imagine a single cause. Climate change is due to multiple causes that are spread out all over the world. Subsequently, teaching students about climate change involves integrative and interdisciplinary thinking.

Greenhouse gases are invisible: Students tend to overlook causes that are not obvious. This poses as a challenge when it comes to climate change, as we cannot see or touch greenhouse gases.

It involves going back in time: People have difficulty reasoning about patterns over time. Studying climate change involves looking at data that goes back over hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years.

It can’t be explained through simple, linear narrative: Often when we explain how things come about to students, we do so in a linear, causal manner (e.g. X happened, then Y and Z). Climate change cannot be explained like this due to the multiple causes that global in nature.

It has no boundaries: We often see the world as a place divided up by multiple boundaries. Studying climate change requires a shift in this limited thinking to see that the atmosphere and oceans are shared by everyone on Earth.

As a result of these educational challenges, it is tempting for many of us to want to ignore or dismiss climate change. There are however various ways in which these challenges can be overcome in the classroom. These are:

1. Use lots of visual aids to make the invisible visible (E.g. 20 black balloons blown up can represent 1kg of carbon dioxide).

2. Use computers to display simulations of causal connections between the actions people take and climate change.

3. Share experiences (not just data) from all over the world with students. Consider sharing stories from hunters in Alaska, farmers in outback Australia and young children in pacific islands whose homes are being affected by rising sea levels.

4. Show students powerful visuals of humans and animals in danger of climate change rather than only images of landscapes (e.g. melting glacier). The reasoning for this is that many people can easily empathise with humans and animals but have greater difficulty empathising with such things as landscapes.

5. Students want to know how climate change relates to them. Wherever possible show students how this issue will affect them, their house, their pocket, their leisure activities, their street, their region, their country, etc.

6. Empower students by showing them the different ways they can make a difference in combating climate change (turning things off at the power point, planting trees, etc.)

If you have any other strategies on how to teach this complex topic to others, I would love to hear from you.

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