Parents and teachers want students to learn about the climate crisis, writes Sabine von Mering. But schools, even in Massachusetts, aren't preparing kids to live on a warming planet.
published between 1970 and 2019. The experts found that coverage of climate change had actually decreased during that period. As had the focus on solutions to the crisis. No surprise, then, that our students feel unprepared.
Megan O’Donnell, a recent graduate of Wayland High School , devoted her senior project to researching what teachers at WHS are teaching about climate change. Her results show clearly that there is a lot of room for improvement. Unless a student is enrolled in a particular level of chemistry, it seems, they will not encounter any climate science during their four years of high school.
Tara Sawrikar, a 10th-grade WHS student, who also serves as a student member on Wayland’s Climate and Energy Committee, surveyed WHS students, asking them how worried they are about climate change, whether they have taken a class or a unit on the subject and what they wish they had learned about it. Of the 38 students who responded, the large majority said they were concerned or very concerned, and about 66% said they had not encountered a class or unit about the subject.
Sawrikar does not claim to have interviewed a representative sample, and O’Donnell and Sawrikar’s interest was spurred by their 8th-grade science teachers. Indeed, the Wayland Middle School science curriculum does include a few weeks of climate education at the very end. But there is only so much a single unit in 8th grade can cover.
But what hits home the most in Sawrikar’s survey results are the students’ responses to the question about what they wish they had been taught. “Everything,” two of them say. Other answers: “Anything more about it”; “Maybe some more baseline knowledge like what exactly is happening and why”; “about how bad it really is and what we can do and why it matters.” Perhaps now you feel that punch to the stomach, too?It’s not like there are no good resources that teachers can incorporate.
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