Food is a powerful frame through which to make the climate change problem more concrete and “close to home,” as it implies both a social and essential daily activity. The garden, meanwhile, provides a useful metaphor for the complex global climate system. The curriculum directly connects climate science to community and local action in the garden, thus linking food and climate systems. This systems-thinking lens aligns with Next Generation Science Standards , something that motivates teacher participation if their schools have adopted NGSS. Through local examples, garden activities and guest speakers, the curriculum connects students to other change makers and empowers them with agency to help build a more sustainable food system in their community. Students learn to think of climate change as more than “just” a science problem: it is a social problem requiring action and responsibility from all levels of society—individual to international. Each of the six lessons involves students in activities that translate regenerative agriculture theory into practice . The curriculum provides opportunities for students to learn scientific facts ,hydroponic grow systems share personal narratives , and enact hands-on solutions to climate change via school gardens .
They learn about the negative effects of elevated CO2 in the atmosphere globally and then help lower CO2 locally through increasing plant photosynthetic activity. The pedagogical framework for the curriculum is inspired by Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy and other more current framings of a signature pedagogy for sustainable food systems education . Educators facilitate collective learning experiences that are often subversive in nature and seek to disrupt inequitable outcomes, both environmental and social. Curriculum implementation followed a co-teaching model. The researcher-teacher partnership draws on complementary domains of expertise: content expertise from the researcher, and classroom management/student dynamic expertise from the teacher. Two symbiotic goals are addressed using co-teaching as an implementation method: 1) students learn climate change from a content expert, and 2) teachers increase knowledge and competence in climate change instruction, allowing future students to benefit from a better-trained instructor and serving as a form of professional development. Studies have shown repeatedly that the best way to improve student performance across a range of subjects is to boost teacher knowledge and competency . This type of participatory, co-teaching implementation inherently limits ability to statistically analyze a large, representative, or randomly generated dataset of students. It is grounded in social science theory of the qualitative, in-depth case study.
Each school required slightly different implementation of the curriculum. In one case snow days canceled several coteaching sessions, which then had to take place via Skype. Taken as a whole, these four cases shed light on important adjustments that can be made to tailor climate change education interventions to site-specific school needs. Pragmatically, meeting unique school needs is a prerequisite for implementing any non-mandatory education intervention in partnership with schools. The study simultaneously investigates student responses to an experiential climate curriculum, and teacher responses to co-teaching as a form of professional development. The methods used for evaluating curriculum efficacy include 1) semi-structured teacher interviews, 2) student surveys , and 3) participant-site observation. Triangulation of these methods improves the validation of results. Deeper understanding can be gained from a small set of cases on CCE, and best practices can then be applied to a larger universe of schools. More specific to each method, teacher interviews followed a six-question interview guide and were semi-structured in nature. Preliminary student surveys provide a baseline for student knowledge and engagement. Compared with post-intervention surveys, this allows basic statistical analysis to define the effect size in the sample population and whether it is significant. The survey assessment includes 10 knowledge-based questions on climate science and food systems applications, as well as 19 engagement questions asking opinion statements measured on Likert-type scales.
This multi-faceted assessment of climate literacy recognizes that “knowledge about climate change can be divided into several general and overlapping categories: knowledge about how the climate system works; specific knowledge about the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to global warming; contextual knowledge placing human-caused global warming in historical and geographic perspective; and practical knowledge that enables individual and collective action” . The engagement questions adapt the Six Americas survey questions to capture students’ change in engagement towards climate change following the curriculum intervention. Participant and site observation over a six week period captures important features of the school climate, both environmental and social, that help contextualize interpretation of results. The quality of the school garden, behavioral norms, and student informal interactions are all variables of interest for understanding other forms of data collection. In climate literacy evaluations, it is important to understand student intention to take action and follow up to document concrete examples of students taking action, which goes beyond simple survey and interview protocols. Certainly, questions can be posed to students asking whether they feel more empowered to seek out their own additional knowledge and participate in climate actions, but ideally these questions can be followed up with evaluation tools documenting actual action outcomes. This was not possible in the contexts of study reported on below but should be a focus for future student climate literacy evaluations. Results presented and discussed below are broadly relevant to climate change education interventions, with some insights as well into the value of food as an engaging entry point or frame for the climate education conversation. Attitude and engagement questions revealed higher levels of concern along the Six Americas spectrum than the national average. The first 10 questions were adapted almost directly from the Six Americas survey, with some modifications for student-friendly language. An additional nine questions were added dealing specifically with food systems, behavior and climate change. Based on the first 10 questions, students were categorized into the six segments from alarmed to dismissive, with almost all students falling in the top three categories . Students demonstrated an overall increase in engagement although this was difficult to measure with precision due to inconsistencies within individual student response patterns. A preliminary analysis is valid for determining directional effect arrows and assessing whether pilot programs show promise, and thus were adequate for this evaluation. Precision could be added in future iterations by simplifying answer scales so they are consistent, and then quantifying student attitudes on a numerical basis. The survey was a bit long to hold student attention, and survey fatigue was a confounding variable in some cases. Work is underway by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communications to create a four-question survey version for teens,vertical grow table which will be a valuable improvement for future studies. Informal observations and conversations reveal a notable curiosity and interest among youth in learning more about climate change. A commonly expressed sentiment, especially at the outset of the curriculum intervention, is that climate change is an important issue that students feel they should know more about. This is mirrored in national statistics reporting that American teens recognize their limited understanding of climate change, and 70% say they would like to know more about the subject . Post-intervention teacher interview themes revealed a widespread appreciation of coteaching as a mechanism for delivering climate change instruction. All teachers interviewed expressed enthusiasm for having a content expert present to deliver instruction on climate, complementing the garden teachers’ expertise in food-related topics, classroom management and student behavior. The positive response from teachers is important to contextualizing student results, as the more enthusiastic and knowledgeable teachers became about climate change connections in the school garden, the more engaging lessons became for students.Teachers were able to learn from the experience and expressed desire to replicate elements of the curriculum on their own in the future, thus meeting one of the process-specific goals of the research. Interviewees also revealed a common theme of searching for hope and action amidst the daunting reality of climate change; the garden and classroom were often identified as key arenas where hope and solution steps exist. Key quotes from interviews are highlighted in Table 15 below.These results, in particular the challenges highlighted by teachers, closely match national findings on climate change education.
In a recent national review of science teachers, the first nationally representative study of science educators to focus on climate change, fewer than half of all teachers reported any formal coursework on climate change, yet over two thirds would like targeted professional development opportunities to allow them to dive in deeper to this complex and emotionally sensitive topic . It is well established that teachers are in need of professional development in order to teach an unfamiliar subject with confidence and competence, and several national leaders in climate education are addressing this . Having a climate science “expert” in the classroom to co-teach a climate change curriculum for the first time is another promising form of PD explored here. Partnerships emerged as a key feature enabling success of food and climate education in schools, mirroring the findings in example 1 above. Partner organizations and individuals are able to provide infrastructure support, outdoor learning environments, guest speakers to reinforce climate education units, and program evaluation assistance. Questions of how to scale impact via partnerships at the district or state level and education policy implications are discussed below. Examining results by school context offers strategies for scaling this type of intervention in rural vs. urban school districts. Students at the Lopez school, with abundant local farm and forest resources to devote to furthering climate curricula endeavors, selected a bio-char experiment as a class climate action project, and will be applying locally produced bio-char to test plots in the school garden to compare with non-treated plots , in partnership with the community. This community-school partnership adds to the body of successful climate change engagement strategies meriting replication, particularly other rural communities where local farmers might be interested in participating in farm to school programming at the school or district level. Experiential food and climate change education is an emerging branch of CCE with great potential, where the school garden provides one context for experiential climate learning while many others are possible . By emphasizing and teaching local forms of food production and consumption, this CCE example seeks to localize climate stewardship and in doing so reduce the carbon footprint of food system products and processes. The food-climate nexus diagram presented in Chapter 1 offers both an impetus for scaling this form of integrated food-climate education, and an example of how to do so while visualizing food-climate interactions. This chapter reports on initial positive results from integrating CCE into both the humanities and school garden classrooms. In the case of humanities-focused CCE, students not only demonstrated gains in climate literacy, but also improved their reading comprehension. Sixth grade students performed at a level equivalent to their eighth-grade peers in terms of listing numerous climate mitigation strategies, and reported both looking up new information and speaking with friends/family about climate change more frequently than all other middle school grades. The examples from school garden classrooms more explicitly adopt and test the hypothesis that experiential CCE is more effective than didactic or lecture-based climate instruction. Results show improvements in student learning and strong student interest in the topic. However, further evaluation methodology development is needed to best capture the impacts on student action and behavior. In order to understand the efficacy of experiential CCE relative to CCE that is not experiential, a controlled experiment would be required that uses the same evaluation methodology for students with and without experiential CCE. This methodology would ideally comprise and observational element where teachers report on student “climate actions” over the course of a defined time period. In future studies, a list of core “climate actions” could be developed as a baseline for evaluators to assess whether students are carrying out these activities . Both food-focused and humanities-focused CCE point at an underlying characteristic of CCE. Rather than being treated as its own subject, or topic to be covered in science classrooms, climate change is an overarching frame that infuses all sorts of school activities, processes, and classrooms, from the transportation that bring students to school, to the food that is served in the cafeteria, to the content students are covering with their mathematics, physics, government, or garden teachers.