This Earth Day, Teach Climate Change as a Global Issue

Since 1970, educators and children have celebrated Earth Day every April 22 in an effort to raise awareness and promote action on environmental issues. When we were classroom teachers, we often recognised the day with our elementary students through activities like composting, planting seeds, or making recycled art. Over time, we’ve become convinced that this is not enough. Educators need to take meaningful action to integrate climate change education into schools, helping young people to become responsible citizens who care and act for both the social and natural world–on and beyond Earth Day.

Climate change–long-term shifts in temperature and weather patterns that is currently being driven by human activity–is causing more frequent and severe weather (resulting in the loss of homes, forced migration, and death) and a rapid loss of biodiversity. The negative impacts are felt disproportionately in areas where there is weak governance, high poverty, and poor access to resources. Climate change has been called one of the most significant and urgent “wicked problems” (Head & Alford, 2008) of our time. While young people are leading efforts to cultivate a sustainable future in their communities and on the international stage, they yearn for more opportunities to engage with climate change education and action (Karsgaard & Davidson, 2023).

In our book, Teaching Climate Change to Children: Literacy Pedagogy that Cultivates Sustainable Futures (Teachers College Press, 2024), we describe how teachers can support children to read, write, speak and act on climate change through literacy-based climate pedagogy. We highlight three anchoring themes to guide this work: interconnectivity (understanding that our social and natural worlds are interconnected, and that everything has a role), relationality (acknowledging our responsibility to live in relationship to and care for both our fellow human beings and the natural world), and action (working together to create change, solve complex problems, and impact systems). Our book offers advice for teachers on “starting small” (e.g., facilitating rich talk about concepts related to nature, the environment, and climate change during thematic/topical read alouds) or “going big” (e.g., designing interdisciplinary and action-oriented units), as well as support for fostering an emotionally-affirming approach and incorporating arts-based methods.

Because climate change impacts all nations and populations, and requires collective action and understanding of the interconnectedness of global challenges, education that is oriented to making a positive difference in the world often positions climate change as a global issue (e.g., Misiaszek, 2017). However, a key challenge in climate change education and communication is that people perceive climate change to be far away in time and space. One way researchers have explored this is to examine what impacts climate change beliefs and risk perceptions, finding evidence that personal, emotional stories about the local impact of climate change can be especially persuasive (Gustafson et al., 2020). Similarly, in our work with teachers and children over the past five years, we’ve found that the most motivating approaches often take a global, or global-local, approach that contextualizes climate change as part of large, interconnected, global issues while connecting to specific, local topics, actions, and impacts (Schutz, Woodard, & Peek, 2024).

For example, when we explore water justice with pre-service teachers, we first read novels and picture books set in many different contexts (e.g., India, the southeastern United States, Native communities) and exploring a variety of different but related issues (e.g., water scarcity, water pollution, privatization). Then, we read informational texts, including multimodal texts like documentaries and podcasts, to learn more about particular topics of interest (Schutz & Woodard, 2024). After “thinking global” in such ways, we “act local,” learning about and acting on water issues impacting our own community (in our case that is Chicago, Illinois, in the United States), such as microplastics and invasive species in Lake Michigan and lead contamination in our public school water supplies. Environmental place-based education (PBE) that takes a global stance is a great method to support youth to engage in stewardship endeavors that positively impact their local community and environment (Hamilton & Marckini-Polk, 2023).

A global approach helps children to begin to see the connections among our natural and social worlds, and to act with agency to positively impact the health of our earth through meaningful action in their local communities. Armed with this understanding, we hope educators will be inspired to move beyond Earth Day as a one-time celebration towards yearlong inquiries of complex, global socioecological problems coupled with on-going local, environmental citizenship work and action.