By Abigail Popple, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, RMG
Climate Change in Teacher Education, a project started by researchers at the University of Northern BC (UNBC), was awarded a $60,489 grant to study how K-12 teachers in northern B.C. understand climate change and incorporate the topic into their teaching. The grant, administered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, will allow the team to deliver workshops on climate change and education, and connect with northern B.C. teachers who are discussing climate change in the classroom.
Dr. Hartley Banack, the project’s principal investigator and Assistant Professor in UNBC’s School of Education, told The Goat that researchers want to highlight and address gaps in B.C.’s current curriculum, which he says provides little guidance on discussing climate change in the classroom. But beyond pressuring the Province to focus more on K-12 climate education, the project will ideally build a foundation for teachers to connect with one another and examine how they can incorporate climate change into their practices, he said.
“One hope is that we’ll be able to help teachers, particularly in the northern B.C. context, figure out how they are teaching climate change,” he said. “We want to develop a community of teachers who can interact with each other and support each other.”
To this end, the research will involve producing interactive workshops similar to the ones the Climate Change in Teacher Education initiative has already done. Recordings of previous workshops are available on the UNBC website, and include topics such as evaluating climate change teaching strategies and managing climate change anxiety. Researchers will survey participants before and after each workshop to gather information about teachers’ attitudes towards climate change education, and provide an opportunity for teachers to share lesson plans or other tools they’ve used to tackle climate change in the classroom.
“We know that [climate change] is impacting both teachers and learners in real ways, and we want folks to feel prepared in how they’re responding and how they’re helping younger people process their feelings and feel empowered,” Banack said. “We’re very interested in creative pedagogy and the types of action people are taking to respond to climate change in their local area.”
Because northern areas feel the impacts of climate change more acutely than their southern counterparts – Natural Resources Canada’s report “Canada’s Changing Climate” found that northern Canada is warming at over double the global rate of warming – Banack says learning how to discuss and teach about climate change is an important issue for northern B.C.
“When you think about climate change, it’s a highly complex phenomenon with lots of shifts and perspectives. It’s not going to be solved by any singular project or individual. That’s why this [collaboration] is a really strategic move for us,” Banack said.
Still, climate change impacts everyone in Canada and beyond. That’s why the project involves collaboration from multiple researchers at UNBC, UBC, Cape Breton University, and two organizations that advocate for education on sustainability and climate change in Canadian classrooms: the Institute for Environmental Learning and Learning for a Sustainable Future. Banack said this collaboration is crucial for tackling the subject of climate change as thoroughly as possible.
“When you think about climate change, it’s a highly complex phenomenon with lots of shifts and perspectives. It’s not going to be solved by any singular project or individual. That’s why this [collaboration] is a really strategic move for us,” Banack said.
Banack’s team initially focused on pre-service teachers – that is, those in the process of earning accreditation before officially entering the workforce – but recently received approval from the research ethics board to expand to in-service teachers. He hopes to work with teachers from School District 57 (which encompasses Valemount and McBride) as well as School District 52 around Prince Rupert for this next phase of research, and invites interested teachers to contact him at [email protected].
