This discussion series brings together an international community of scholars, educators and climate justice leaders to explore the emotional impact of climate disruption, and how we can help our students navigate the long emergency ahead. With feelings of eco-grief, nihilism, and climate anxiety on the rise, educators across disciplines need resources to help students develop the emotional resilience and existential tenacity to stay engaged in climate solutions. Each informal discussion will feature a different theme and facilitator, allowing participants to share and develop new practices, resources, pedagogical tools, and research. Our goal is to build an interdisciplinary toolkit for effective teaching in the age of climate disruption, and create opportunities to network, collaborate, and build an international scholarly community.

We welcome participants from activist traditions, environmental humanists and psychologists, ESS educators, and researchers/educators from any other discipline engaged in difficult issues like biodiversity loss, climate change, and environmental injustice. Please contact Jennifer Atkinson at jenwren@uw.edu to join.

Schedule for 2021

(for a Zoom link to join these conversations, please email Jennifer Atkinson at jenwren@uw.edu)

• Jan 19 (Tues), 8am Pacific Time: Sarah Jaquette Ray on “Climate Anxiety, Privilege, and Race in the Environmental Classroom”: Is climate anxiety only relevant to privileged students/educators? How do our assumptions about climate feelings reinforce racial biases in environmental classes? How can we bring better racial lenses to work with climate feelings and thereby also make environmental education more inclusive? What are the nuances of feelings associated with different communities' feelings about climate change, and how can we integrate those into our teaching?

  Sarah Jaquette Ray is a Professor of Environmental Studies at Humboldt State University and the author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety (UC Press, 2020).

  Watch this discussion with Sarah
  

• Feb 19 (Friday), 9am Pacific Time: Peter Friederici on "Exploring new ideas for telling climate change stories”: How do we shape climate change stories that promote action rather than inaction? During this session, Peter Friederici will share material from his current book project, tentatively titled Breakdown: Climate Change and the Failure of Narrative (a reading section from the manuscript will be pre-circulated). Breakdown looks at how our society's widespread adherence to particular storylines poses a great challenge to effectively dealing with climate change.

  Peter Friederici is a Professor in the School of Communication and Director of the Program in Sustainable Communities at Northern Arizona University. As an award-winning journalist specializing in science and environmental stories, Peter is interested in how complex topics are communicated through today’s media.

  Watch this discussion with Peter

  
  

• Mar 5 (Friday), 9am Pacific Time: Jennifer Ladino on “Fear Emotions and Climate Change”: This session will explore how we might think (and teach) in more nuanced terms about emotions related to fear (including worry, dread, and anxiety). Jennifer will share findings from a collaborative project she’s working on with sociology colleagues that aims to understand the emotions informing climate skepticism. Jennifer looks forward to hearing how others manage so-called negative emotions in their classrooms and research, and how we negotiate the relationship between fear/anxiety and positive emotions such as hope/resilience/love.

  Jennifer Ladino is a professor of English at the University of Idaho and the author of Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites (2019) and Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (2012). She co-edited, with Kyle Bladow, Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (2018) and has published articles on a range of subjects in the environmental humanities. 

  Watch this discussion with Jennifer

• Apr 16 (Friday), 9am Pacific Time Frances Roberts-Gregory, on “Feminist Tools for Collective Care, Security, & Healing Justice.” This discussion will explore feminist tools such as autoethnography and social media to promote emotional resiliency, healing justice, and post-traumatic growth in climate justice classrooms. Frances will reflect on her experiences engaging high school, early college, undergraduate, and graduate students around environmental racism, gender, climate change, and sustainable development. We will also explore ways climate educators can cope with digital harassment and bullying from students who are triggered, provoked, and challenged by creative and abolitionist pedagogies.

  Frances Robert-Gregory is Ph.D. Candidate in Society & Environment at UC Berkeley, and a Future Faculty Fellow at Northeastern University's School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs. Frances is a feminist political ecologist, environmental educator, and ecowomanist ethnographer. Her doctoral research explores how women of color in Gulf Coast Louisiana navigate contradictory relationships with energy and petrochemical industries, resist environmental racism, and advocate for environmental, energy, and climate justice. She is also a member of the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal Coalition and plans to conduct feminist climate research while mentoring the next generation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) environmental leaders in the years to come.

  Watch this discussion with Frances

  
  

• April 30 (Friday) 12:oo noon Pacific Time with Krista Hiser: In this session, Krista will share preliminary findings from her qualitative study “Teaching Climate Change”, which consists of 33 interviews with college faculty across academic disciplines. The study is based on current research with college faculty, which follows from the "Worry & Hope" student focus group study published in the Journal of Community Engagement and Scholarship, along with an interview on Citizens Climate Radio (with Sarah Jaquette Ray).

  Krista Hiser is a professor at Kapiʻolani Community College where she teaches composition, climate communication, and climate fiction. Her PhD in Educational Administration focused on students as stakeholders in sustainability curriculum. Krista serves as Director of the UH System Center for Sustainability Across the Curriculum, where she supports faculty in updating and transforming courses to include sustainability and climate change education. She is active in sustainability organizations including AASHE, Global Council for Science and the Environment, and the Sustainability Curriculum Council. Krista also publishes a Field Notes blog on Medium, Teaching Climate Change in Higher Education.

  Watch this discussion with Krista

  
  

• May 28 (Friday) 9:00am Pacific Time with Elin Kelsey: This session will officially launch the website for our Existential Toolkit for Climate Educators! Our host Elin Kelsey will discuss the tools featured on the website, plans to build this out further, and next steps for both the discussion series and the toolkit itself.

  Elin Kelsey, PhD, is a leading spokesperson, scholar and educator in the area of evidence-based hope. Elin’s work focuses on the reciprocal relationship between humans and the rest of nature, particularly in relation to the emotional implications of the narrative of environmental doom and gloom on children and adults. Her influence can be seen in the hopeful, solutions-focus of her clients including the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and other institutions where she has served as a visiting fellow including the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Passionate about bringing science-based stories of hope and multi-species resilience to the public, Kelsey is a popular keynote speaker and media commentator. In 2014, she co-created #OceanOptimism, a twitter campaign to crowd-source marine conservation solutions which has reached more than 95 million shares to date. In 2019 she served as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University in the Graduate School of Education, bringing a critical emphasis on hope to an interdisciplinary think tank on environmental issues. As an Adjunct Faculty member of the University of Victoria School of Environmental Studies, she is spearheading the development of a solutions-oriented paradigm for educating environmental scientists and social scientists. She is a feature writer for Hakai Magazine and a best-selling Children’s Book Author.

  Watch this discussion with Elin

2020 Schedule

• Oct 5, 9am Pacific: Elizabeth Watts on "Mindfulness and Compassion": Studies have shown that mindfulness practices support the creation of pro-social learning environments. In this zoom meeting we will examine how mindfulness and compassion can be used to alleviate the negative emotional burden that may accompany learning about climate change.

   

• Oct 22, 8am Pacific: Jessica Creane on "Play": We remember what we do far better than what we're told. When it comes to complex subject matter, like climate change, both the doing and the being told about it are hard. Play helps make the hard work of learning about things that make us anxious and scared into something fun. It doesn’t take the work away, but it changes our motivations to do the work. In this session, we will be exploring how play can be used to facilitate community and connections to make climate action a more joy-based pursuit.

• Nov 4, 9am Pacific. Elin Kelsey on "Hope": Evidence-based arguments for hope improve our capacity to engage with the overwhelming issues we face. We need to situate our understanding of what's happening with the environment in real time and real circumstances. Hope is not complacent. It is a powerful political act.

  View this Discussion with Elin Kelsey

• Nov 16, 8am Pacific. Panu Pihkala on "Encountering Difficult Emotions in Climate Change Education." People have many difficult emotions in relation to ecological issues and the state of the world. Notoriously difficult are anxiety, fear, grief, and anger, but also joy and pride can be difficult to feel, due to guilt and social pressures. Dr. Panu Pihkala from University of Helsinki, a researcher and educator specialized in ecological emotions and eco-anxiety, will facilitate a discussion about ways that difficult emotions could be encountered constructively in climate education. His most recent publication in Sustainability (2020) is titled "Anxiety and the Ecological Crisis: An Analysis of Eco-Anxiety and Climate Anxiety”

• Dec 4, 9am Pacific. Lisa Kretz on "Affect studies in the classroom." Emotions are always already operating in the classroom. If addressed, they offer powerful ways to inspire and empower. If left unaddressed, they can negatively impact learning in concerning ways. We will explore the many ways in which emotions are operating in learning, and how to embrace all that they offer for effective pedagogy. Dr. Kretz is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Evansville and an activist with multiple publications. She has given over 100 presentations on topics such as Hope and Climate Change, Bridging the Theory-Action Gap, Environmental Ethics, Oppression Theory, and Philosophy of Emotion.

  View this discussion with Lisa Kretz

• Dec 15, 9am Pacific. Benjamin Bowman on “‘A real education’? Supporting the youth struggle for climate justice.” How can we support young people with the tools for change, at a time when so many young activists are calling for "systems change, not climate change?" In this workshop we’ll talk about student-led, and especially youth-led, tools for radical teaching. Ben Bowman is a youth studies specialist with broad academic background in the politics of youth and young people's activism. Benjamin works with the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, and is Lecturer in Youth Justice at Manchester Metropolitan University.  Read one of his many articles on youth climate activism in The Conversation."

  “Real education sometimes happens outside of the classroom. I think the school climate strikes have really proven that" – Brianna Fruean

  View this discussion with Benjamin Bowman