Bethany Hobbs

An “all day workshop” can make me pretty skeptical. But when Bill Bigelow, one of my biggest inspirations and mentors as an educator, came to town on the first weekend in December, I excitedly hopped out of bed and geared up for a day of thinking about and strategizing how to keep teaching climate justice.

The depth of Bill’s content knowledge and his years of teaching experience allowed him to answer our questions with meaningful insights and model how to work with students. And his interest and discipline related to study reminded me to be learning just as much as I am teaching — to be in the scholarship about climate justice, and to bring the global context of it into my classroom.

Already an avid user of the A People’s Curriculum for the Earth, I was also thrilled to experience several of the exercises with other participants at the workshop. I have understood the reasons behind using the Climate Change Mixer, the Vía Campesina summit, and the Write That I poems. But the goals of teaching this way took on a whole new level of relevance; I felt why it matters to approach this type of knowledge in such a student-centered way.

We have got to call our students into the creative, community-building that we’ll all need to resist inequity and injustice.