Let’s Talk About Climate! Interdisciplinary Teaching Ideas

The Let’s Talk About Climate! Interdisciplinary Teaching Ideas for All Subjects & Grade Levels is available online for free access. Here is a description of the guide, excerpted from the introduction.

The purpose of this guide is to help teachers find ways to integrate climate and sustainability concepts in their classrooms — in ways that will enrich and enhance the classes and help meet learning goals. Sustainability concepts are inherently complex and well-served by interdisciplinary approaches, so we also include ideas on how that could work. Equally important, it’s essential that these topics be covered in core subjects in which all students participate, not just environmental science or other elective courses.

It’s important for schools to be leaders in raising community awareness of global warming and climate change.

We are not trying to provide a curriculum or even individual units or lesson plans — our goal is simply to provide a variety of entry points that can help teachers integrate climate and sustainability issues in your classroom. Adapt the information you find here to fit your classes, your students. It’s not an addition to what you have to cover — it’s a way to help meet learning goals and to enrich and enhance your classes, a framework that can help you reach goals for student learning and skill development.

This is not just for science teachers! In fact, a pure science perspective may fail to develop the social, ethical, and political contexts that are critical to understanding this issue. This guide provides context and information for teachers in any subject area to feel comfortable with these topics — background information and sources on global warming’s causes, impacts, and social-justice implications. We also include sample ideas for engaging students in every subject area.

It’s also worth mentioning that people tend to use the terms global warming and climate change interchangeably. Global warming is the direct result of more heat being trapped by higher levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, causing slow increases in temperature. The warmer land and oceans causes climate change that we experience directly. So global warming and climate change aren’t exactly the same, but they both refer to the same phenomena.

A project of the Alliance for Sustainable Communities–Lehigh Valley.