Introduction to The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World

By Sarah Jaquette Ray and Jennifer Atkinson

This blog post is an excerpt from Atkinson and Ray’s forthcoming book, The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to Teach in a Burning World, which is coming out with University of California Press in spring 2024. The book promises to be an invaluable resource for the college classroom. It fills a lacuna in most climate change education by centering two themes that are often ignored or sidelined: emotions and justice. For more information about the book, please see UC Press, here. 

Climate, Justice, and Emotions in the Classroom*

The climate predicament is demanding that higher education radically change. If we are in a womb, not a tomb, as the poet Valarie Kaur stated in a speech in 2016,(1) how are educators to help midwife what’s to come?

It is no longer morally or strategically appropriate to berate students with dire forecasts and reports of the sixth great extinction, to teach case studies of slow violence and ecological destruction, or present problems so deep and entrenched that solutions appear elusive. With students coming into the classroom already aware of how bad things are, the old model of scaring them into caring is no longer working.

Even worse, the doom and gloom model is backfiring, as shown by a growing body of scholarship on the role of emotions in climate action. In Living in Denial, Kari Norgaard demonstrates that the “information deficit” assumption of most environmental messages, which maintains that people and systems will change when enough climate facts are heard, is a myth. Instead, apathy is the most likely result of these doom-focused change messages, as climate psychologists like Renee Lertzman have demonstrated.. Even if pro-social, pro-environmental, and activist behavior are the initial responses to the fear and urgency peddled in most climate messages, the longer-term costs (to the planet and to our students) of climate anxiety are well documented.(2) Indeed, Haltinner and Sarachandra have shown that skepticism is actually a reasonable way to cope with being overwhelmed by such messages. Environmental melancholia, eco-phobia, degradation desensitization,(3) and other emotion-focused terms are emerging to explain how the apocalyptic approach to climate messaging simply doesn’t work. If psychologists and climate communication experts know that piling on the doom makes us feel powerless, despairing, skeptical, and apathetic, why are so many educators still teaching this way?

One fundamental premise of this collection arises from the insight that many educators have come to: emotions shape not only students’ capacity for learning,(4) but also their ability to respond meaningfully and effectively to what they’re learning. Most environmental educators want students to feel inspired to engage in sustained, lifelong action in service of climate justice, environmental protection, and both personal and societal healing. And most educators are aware that we are at a turning point in education, requiring enhanced skills to respond to these times.(5) But few are aware of what psychologists, affect theorists, narrative experts, and students of most wisdom traditions and social movements all know—that the key to these outcomes is not logic, information, data, or facts, but (as much, and relatedly) emotion. This book seeks to bring the most up-to-date research on climate emotions to bear on college-level pedagogy.

Further, learning how to best teach “difficult knowledge”(6) has long been necessary in fields such as gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, critical race theory, ethnic studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, history, social work, child development, and other fields where trauma and violence characterize the central human experience, both in the content and for the students in the room. Learning trauma-informed pedagogy to facilitate healing conversations with students is essential for educators in these fields.

“An older problem with teaching climate was to make it relevant, touchable, imminent, because it was framed in dominant climate spaces as distant, abstract, and uncertain; this is no longer the case—a majority of students feel climate change is relevant to their lives right now.”

Yet climate educators have mostly viewed their subject matter as technological, ecological, physical, atmospheric, or at best, only distantly related to human systems, much less to trauma, injustice, and oppression. This approach reflects the relative insulation of most faculty and institutions of industrialized nations from the worst effects of climate change. The pedagogy of climate studies has primarily emerged from a Western, Eurocentric, positivist epistemology, often failing to engage in pedagogies of power and injustice—much less offering support to traumatized students.

As climate education has become enshrined as a topic of the sciences, some experts exert their privilege in part by remaining oblivious to the ways climate change is changing higher education, how student demographics are shifting, and the fact that climate change is directly and indirectly harming students and their communities. Yet it is no longer effective or ethical to teach climate topics without some training in trauma-informed pedagogy and without an analysis of white supremacy, heteronormative patriarchy, and Indigenous epistemology—lenses which are the domain of fields typically not in the sciences. In The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators, we aim to move climate pedagogy in these directions, bringing other frameworks to bear, in addition to the insights of psychology, on our awareness of how climate information works on and through students.

Another argument for centering emotions in climate pedagogy is that educators themselves are exhausted, overwhelmed, and often wrestling with climate emotions like despair, anger, apathy, and hopelessness. The coronavirus pandemic has made matters worse. It revealed in stark relief that the working conditions of educators, including at the college level, are precarious and exploited. This was worse for female faculty, and more so for female faculty of color, faculty with disabilities, and any faculty who were also relied upon for caregiving of children or elders. The absence of a social safety net, the conditions for social reproduction, and access to technology and medical support profoundly affected educators and their students, turning spaces of education into spaces of survival where basic needs for food, shelter, and medicine took precedence over academic learning, much less content acquisition, career advancement, and skill development. Many environmental studies courses already highlight the larger failures of capitalist society, but the pandemic further forced this analysis to the fore. More than ever, students are ready to imagine, desire, and build a different world. They don’t want to “go back to normal,” and they often see how “normal” was already bad for people and the environment. Abolition, mutual aid, intentional communities, new definitions of kinship, public banking, and taking governance, education, and infrastructure into their own hands—these are the skills students desire, since they have lost faith that existing systems will fix what ails us.

Photo Credit: Fabrice Florin / flickr/ ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

So what is the role of the climate educator in this context? How, in good faith, can we train students for careers in a world where the current economic system is unraveling? We are teaching in an existentially pivotal moment. What does pedagogy for a just transition look like? What is the task of higher education in what the famous eco-Buddhist social activist Joanna Macy calls “the Great Turning”? As we see in ongoing global youth activism, and as many of us feel in our classrooms daily, students barely have the patience to go through the motions of getting an education as a means to an individualist, career-oriented end. They are waking up to the fact that their time on this planet is limited, and that what they—and we--do now will significantly shape the future of life for all beings on this planet. Students want something different from their education than what their professors studied. How will we as educators—often exhausted, burned out, and despairing, too—rise to this moment?

Centering Justice in Climate Education: It Gets Emotional

The climate movement has only recently started to learn from and integrate insights from transnational environmental justice movements. For the most part, climate educators have been teaching in the same way—from a dominant, positivist, settler-colonial set of assumptions about how social change works. With political changes bringing together the climate and justice movements, a powerful new moment—often dubbed climate justice—is shaping a whole generation. Social movements such as Idle No More, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter all demonstrate that the climate movement is pivoting toward a justice orientation. In this historical context, many of our college-aged students, who are coming to consciousness and coming of age, are bringing this lens to our classes. Moreover, in many higher-ed contexts, the “traditional” student is changing. What does this mean for intergenerational conversation, and how can we stage it effectively in our classrooms?

Out of these shifting forces, the climate movement—and sometimes education—is finally focusing on the disproportionate costs and benefits of climate change: the ways that disposability, racism, patriarchy, and extraction are at the root of both social injustice and environmental degradation. It is suspicious of climate policy that doesn’t also address inequality. Following the work of thinkers like Lindsay Dhillon and Julie Sze, David Pellow, Rob Nixon, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, adrienne maree brown, and Mary Annaise Heglar, for example, the climate justice movement connects the ability to breathe to both the spectacular violence of police brutality and the less visible, long-term pollution of living in neighborhoods targeted for toxic siting. These systems-level analyses locating the root of the problem not in emissions but in injustice have become mainstream. Climate justice, not just the climate movement, has arrived.

Yet many educators struggle to teach from this insight, to meet students where they are. Some of the challenges educators report in their efforts to bring climate justice to the classroom are:

“How can we harness our classes as labs for precisely the social healing that is required to move where we need to on climate justice, at the scales of both the interpersonal and the political?”

Challenge 1:

Cancel culture and the politicization of climate justice. In our classes, the culture wars do play out and we, as well as our students from all political parties and backgrounds, and the institution of higher education itself, are often getting “canceled.” Many conservative students feel their very identities are under attack when the word “justice” is added to conversations about climate change (climate topics seem “safer” than conversations about race). Meanwhile, students coming to climate change with a robust justice lens express frustration and harm by repeatedly hearing climate and the environment uncritically discussed in privileged ways. Without skill, educators risk reinforcing the same dynamic of the culture wars at large.

Identity politics have everything to do with climate emotions and they will dictate where we go from here. This signals the shift from climate change as a central focus to climate justice and is a necessary part of teaching climate change in this moment. Student positionality—background, race, assumptions about nature and science, their relative position to power, etc.—all shape how they will respond to both the projects of climate change and social justice. They also shape which emotions are available to different students, and how different students will feel in relationship to different themes.(7) These conversations are not “academic” nor are they just about “identity politics” as has been co-opted by dominant politics;(8) they touch students’ intimate lives. We shouldn’t want it any other way—students learn best when they feel “relevance” between the topic and their lives, and when they have an emotional connection to the material they’re studying.(9)

Photo Credit: Liam 38/flickr/ShareAlike (CC BY-SA 2.0)

An older problem with teaching climate was to make it relevant, touchable, imminent, because it was framed in dominant climate spaces as distant, abstract, and uncertain; this is no longer the case—a majority of students feel climate change is relevant to their lives right now.(10) This is both a cause for concern (climate change is happening to us, now) and celebration (such intimacy engages students in the subject much more readily). Thus, pedagogies that take identity as their primary concern (in fields such as ethnic studies, queer studies, disability studies, gender/sexuality studies) have much to teach climate educators. Climate concern is emotionally potent not just for scientific reasons (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, etc.); it is also emotional because it is complexly overlaid with politics, identity, power, race, gender, geography, privilege, and proximity to climate effects, for example.

Moreover, we contend, students’ emotional assumptions about identity, climate, and power ought to be a subject of analysis to begin with. These differences otherwise are likely to involve significant conflict in the climate classroom, which will in turn affect students’ emotional capacity to engage in the content. How can climate justice educators create conditions in their classrooms for these difficult conversations? How can these conversations become the generative force that helps students build new worlds? How can we harness our classes as labs for precisely the social healing that is required to move where we need to on climate justice, at the scales of both the interpersonal and the political?

It is naive for educators to assume that all students come into their classrooms with neutral or no emotional connection to any of these issues, and that they will all develop them together, uniformly, over the course of the class, with the educator directing this arc. Emotions, trauma, and violent communication patterns are absorbed from the culture we all marinate in, and are in the classroom before we even sit down to pen a syllabus.

The challenge for educators is this: How can we create the conditions in the classroom for these conversations to be productive, and not just repeat the culture wars we see everywhere in mainstream media and that threaten to undermine the very democratic system we need to leverage to mitigate climate change? Might climate justice educators need training in nonviolent communication, deliberative dialogue, trauma-informed pedagogy, and compassionate facilitation?

Challenge 2:

Climate and justice sometimes don’t get along. It’s easy to teach case studies where the solutions to climate change are the solutions to social justice as well. It’s easy to show that climate change is a matter of social justice. We can see the ways climate change is a poverty-multiplier everywhere—in our medical systems, in extending colonial-capitalist extraction, in geographical marginalization . . . the list goes on. But what about when the frames and solutions of climate and justice don’t agree with each other? What if a particular climate mitigation strategy (such as carbon taxes or wind farms) disproportionately impacts an already marginalized community, or challenges indigenous sovereignty? What if a major triumph for social justice comes at the price of faster climate mitigation? We often hear students say “we can’t have social justice if we don’t have a planet” or claim they’re happy to dispense with democracy and inclusion if it means we can move faster, more unilaterally, and even violently in favor of climate protection.

“If we want students to do their part in a collective effort to reduce harm in the world, we have to help them live in a story where that is a possible, likely, and desirable outcome. ”

On the other hand, some students “choose” social justice over climate, because they worry their limited resources for mobilization will be diluted if “shared” with the climate cause. And, tired of being sidelined in the dominant political discourse for white, privileged environmental causes, they understandably hesitate to build coalitions or join mainstream environmental spaces. Even with all of the systems-thinking, intersectional environmental analyses that many students learn before they get to college, a battle of single-issue politics often plays out in the classroom, and it can get heavy, heated, and hurtful.

Are we prepared to navigate the messiness of some students thinking that justice can be sidestepped to do what they think is needed to mitigate climate, or vice versa? How do we facilitate those conversations? Can we bind together the means and the ends for our students, that is, are we prepared to teach climate change as rooted in inequality, and are we prepared to do the slow work of cultivating relationships and equitable processes required to address inequality on the way to addressing climate change? Solidarity is aspirational and easy to theorize, but we can feel its challenges play out in our classes and institutions. For climate education to become climate justice education, educators will need to move beyond the politics of representation and integrate pedagogies much more familiar to those who center justice. Among climate educators trained in colonial systems of education, this requires humility and collaboration, which arguably are also the core of our climate justice solutions.

Challenge 3:

The content may be triggering. We no longer can teach about climate change as if it were an abstraction, distant in time or space. The closer our students are to the frontlines of environmental injustice, the more climate change is affecting them—and there is nowhere that climate change hasn’t touched. Do we know what to do when these climate traumas are triggered in our classrooms? While it has never been considered required training in climate classes to teach what is termed by pedagogy experts as “difficult knowledge,” that is changing. The relative privilege of the climate movement and climate classrooms is crumbling, and therefore, we contend, climate educators must become trauma-informed. 

Challenge 4:

Climate content is often taught as depressing and debilitating. Doom and gloom in general make people shut down, as discussed above. Moreover, weaving a story for students in which the apocalypse is inevitable creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where the “pseudo-inefficacy effect” predisposes students to give up rather than try to fix this flurry of problems. Psychologist Andrew Bryant describes this phenomenon of doomism and the pseudo-inefficacy effect in his essay in this collection:

When we experience fears or anxieties, or see something in the world that needs changing, a common impulse is to jump into a new activity, hoping to ease our difficult emotions by trying to make a difference. If we haven’t processed our underlying emotions, we often choose actions that are not in alignment with our strengths, capacities, and resources, and we can end up feeling disillusioned, deficient, or burned out. In other cases, we have trouble identifying any action that feels worthwhile. Nothing seems like enough, so we throw up our hands, feeling despondent or deficient. We blame ourselves, or decide that no action is worth doing because it won’t be enough.

If we want students to do their part in a collective effort to reduce harm in the world, we have to help them live in a story where that is a possible, likely, and desirable outcome. We also could examine the doom-and-gloom narrative from a justice lens: For whom is that narrative compelling and persuasive? How does privilege shape the stories we live in? In what ways is despair a luxury or hope a survival strategy?

Challenge 5:

Photo Credit: Aaron Maizlish/Flickr/CC BY 2.0

Educators are burned out and not trained as therapists. One of the primary push-backs we hear from educators is that they don’t want to become therapists. As ecology professor Jessica Pratt notes in her essay in this collection, “science faculty, including me, are not trained to confront psychological distress among their students, let alone support them through it.” Most educators are not trauma experts, and they do not want to do harm to students by inviting emotions into the classroom.

While we are not suggesting that all educators must take care of their students’ emotional lives (and this is of particular relevance to gendered and racial analyses of cultural taxation and emotional labor for females, and female faculty, of color), our hope is to convince skeptics that students are already bringing their emotional lives into college, and that it may in fact be more ethical, effective, and generative for educators themselves, too, to collectively address students’ (and to some extent, our own) emotional experiences in the classroom in more explicit ways, so that these responses aren’t stigmatized, shamed, shunted, or suppressed. In this latter case, educators are more likely to be asked for their time and energy outside of the classroom to support students anyway, often in individualized ways that just reiterate the atomism at the root of both our climate and mental health crises. At a minimum, as most contemporary pedagogical research shows, we should pay attention to emotions in our classrooms because emotions are essential to learning, knowledge retention, and decision-making.

We offer the possibility that gaining tools for centering emotions in the classroom supports both students and educators, especially for those who have long been expected to serve as emotional supports to an increasingly despairing population. In treating students as whole people, enabling them to find support in each other (not just from their instructors) as an explicit part of our work during class time, and leveraging current psychological research, we can meaningfully transform our classrooms to respond to this moment.

At the very least, as English professor Ashley Reis reflects in this collection, even if she herself cannot (and should not) become an overnight therapist, she is “equipped to establish an accessible and inclusive classroom, wherein students feel secure and valued to the extent that they are prepared to face and interrogate the emotions that will inevitably arise as we navigate the affective landscape of ecological degradation and social injustice in the age of climate disruption.”

We see these as the central challenges and opportunities for integrating emotions, climate, and justice in higher education. To summarize, our project takes up the following questions, even if this collection itself is only an initial response:

• How can climate justice educators create conditions in the classroom for these conversations to be productive, and not just repeat the culture wars we see everywhere in mainstream media these days?

• Are we prepared to do the slow work of cultivating relationships and equitable processes required to address inequality on the way to (and as fundamental to) addressing climate change?

• What would it take to help climate educators become trauma-informed?

• How can educators help students imagine thriving in a climate-changed world? How can we help students desire, rather than fear, their future?

• How can educators do this work without doing further harm to themselves or to others? Or even better, how might this work enhance educators’ well-being, and increase planetary flourishing?
  

*In 2020, Jennifer, Sarah, and Elin Kelsey hosted a three-day online workshop supported by the Rachel Carson Center in Munich on the topic that was to evolve into this book, “An Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators.” Many participants hailed from our networks in the environmental humanities and the fields of climate emotions and psychology. That gathering ultimately launched a website and a two-year-long discussion series with educators from at least nine different countries. As the network expanded in the years that followed, we learned that participants were keenly interested in a book project that curated existential tools for the climate classroom. The resulting book represents a snapshot of the kinds of experiments in teaching that people in our network have been exploring. It reflects conversations that emerged between clinical practitioners and climate educators. 

Editor bios

Jennifer Atkinson is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, and author of Gardenland: Nature, Fantasy, and Everyday Practice. website:  https://www.drjenniferatkinson.com/

Sarah Jaquette Ray is Professor of Environmental Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt and author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. website: www.sarahjaquetteray.com 

Notes

1. Kaur, “Sikh Prayer for America.”

2. See, for example, Ogunbode et. al.’s study of climate anxiety in 32 countries, which concluded that fear and anxiety were associated with action, but inversely with wellbeing and longer-term engagement.

3. Degradation desensitization is defined as the loss of sensitivity to ecological destruction, status due to consistent exposure to that stimulus. See Alhadeff, “Numb to the World.”

4. See, for example, Cavanagh’s Spark of Learning.

5. A review of scholarship on pedagogy for uncertain times is beyond the scope of this introduction, but a few examples are hooks’s Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community, Maniates’s “Teaching for Turbulence,” and Macrine’s Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times. Many syllabi have been created to support educators integrating recent historical events in their classes, from Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter to the COVID pandemic. Similar efforts have been made around the climate crisis.

6. The idea of difficult knowledge in pedagogy we refer to here comes from Britzman’s Lost Subjects, Contested Objects. 

7. See Ray, “Who Feels Climate Anxiety?”

8. This is the subject of Táíwò’s book Elite Capture, which argues that an effective identity politics can in fact be deeply coalitional and organize across differences toward shared interests, such as climate justice (which he later takes up in Reconsidering Reparations). We use “identity politics” here in the same way he advances it, not as it’s has been “captured” by political parties to divide rather than forge those possible coalitions.

9. See, for example, Duncan-Andrade’s “Note to Educators.”

10. See, for example, Hickman et. al.’s 2021 report, “Climate anxiety in children.”

References

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brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press, 2017.

———, ed. Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press, 2019.

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———. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. London: Routledge, 1994.

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———. Reconsidering Reparations.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.