IslandWood graduate students were featured in this recent Seattle Times article about House Bill 2078
This spring our graduate program, Education for Environment and Community (EEC), included a new course — Climate Change, Climate Justice, & Emotionality. We talked with Renée Comesotti, who designed and taught the course and Dr. Déana Scipio, Ph.D., IslandWood Director of Graduate & Higher Education Programming to hear about this new addition to the graduate program curriculum. Members of the EEC graduate program (class of ’22) participating in a group discussion observed by Dr. Déana Scipio, Ph.D., IslandWood Director of Graduate & Higher Education Programming. What is the course about? Renée: This is a course about teaching and learning in a time of climate crisis, with an explicit goal of realizing education for justice and action. In other words, it’s a course in what it means to be an educator –or a student–in the Anthropocene. (The most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet.) Education is wrestling, in a number of ways, with the problem of teaching about climate injustice and climate change. There’s the pedagogical problem of how best to help students understand the science of climate change and climate change mitigation. Then there’s the much more complex problem of how to help students envision and prepare to enact the social and political changes that will be necessary if we are to fight the current and historical systemic injustices that have led us to this point and build a more just and sustainable world. To do that, educators have to make real changes in how and what we teach. Alongside these is the emotionality of the entire topic. Climate anxiety, eco-fear, guilt, grief, and despair are very real phenomena that are already impacting even very young children – and of course, impacting educators too. How do we begin to help our students to fight climate despair, when we’re subject to it ourselves? So, this course begins with graduate students taking a deep look at their own emotionality and beliefs around climate injustice and climate change. We ask ourselves how we can deal with our complex emotions and use them to help us envision and enact the changes we need to make, personally and as a society. We look at the many intersecting injustices which feed into climate change and climate injustice—and which, at the same time, can point us toward solutions. And then we consider how we can create learning environments and experiences for young people that will do the same for them, helping us all toward a sense of justified hope for the future. One thing we know is that taking action helps us fight anxiety and despair. So does working within community. So educators and students working together to find solutions and take action seems like a pretty good place to start. Renée Comesotti, M.Ed. MEDL, EEC Mentor Coordinator, with an EEC graduate student on IslandWood’s Bainbridge Island campus. What were the outcomes you were hoping for graduate students taking this course? Renée: Given the action orientation of the course, what actions have grad students been taking through their work in the course? Renée: Well there’s been a LOT of doing, imagining and making involved. Students are conducting research, interviewing youth activists and conducting case studies, and finding ways to elevate youth voices in schools and in community. They’re designing tools for educators, and writing new or re-imagining existing curriculum. They’ve held focus groups, community gatherings and intergenerational discussion groups. Many of the students are exploring the arts as both a personal expression of climate/justice emotion and a tool for bringing people together for action, and there have been some public art creation events. And of course, they’ve designed and implemented new curriculum for IslandWood’s own School Overnight Program. A laptop, water bottle, and tea cup belonging to an EEC graduate student in their classroom. What inspired the addition of this course to our graduate curriculum? Déana: The inspiration for the course comes from one developed and taught by Dr. Philip Bell and Nancy Price at the University of Washington. We knew this was something that would really resonate with our grads and felt like an important addition to our EEC graduate program curriculum, which hasn’t previously explicitly addressed climate change. I’ve wanted to make sure that our grads have an opportunity to learn about climate change and, in particular, to think about their own relationship to the emotional responses to the reality of climate change. Can you share some of the texts utilized in the course for folks that might want to dig in more? Renée: Absolutely! Here’s a small handful if you’re looking for encouragement and ways forward for the climate crisis: P.S. While this is the first time that a course explicitly addresses climate change in our graduate program, one of the ways IslandWood has been addressing climate change for the past several years is via our Teacher Professional Development programs, funded through the State’s ClimeTime initiative. If you haven’t already, subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the know about blog posts, news, and events!“One thing we know is that taking action helps us fight anxiety and despair. So does working within community. So educators and students working together to find solutions and take action seems like a pretty good place to start.”