Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow, Adam Sanchez, and Tim Swinehart.
A role-play activity engages students in building solidarity among different groups and organizations fighting fossil fuels and searching for alternatives.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools.
Who — or what — is to blame for the terrible effects of the climate crisis? This trial role play helps students understand the complicated factors involved.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 15 pages.
Using chocolate chip cookie "mining," this lively activity takes a critical look at how the coal industry teaches the impact of coal mining.
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Teaching Activity. By Abby Mac Phail. Rethinking Schools. 17 pages.
A lesson on the Keystone XL Pipeline battle.
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Teaching Activity. By Julie Treick O’Neill and Tim Swinehart. Rethinking Schools. 16 pages.
A role play on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change asks students to develop a list of demands to present to the rest of the world at a climate change meeting.
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Teaching Activity. By Renée Watson. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
A teacher's reflection on the power of poetry to spark critical discussion and reflection on current issues of inequality surrounding disaster response in the United States.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow, Chris Buehler, Julie Treick O'Neill, and Tim Swinehart. Rethinking Schools.
This role play invites students to take on identities of La Vía Campesina activists around the world, to compare/contrast circumstances in order to discover the common goal of “food sovereignty.”
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Teaching Activity. By Suzanna Kassouf, Matt Reed, Tim Swinehart, Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, and Bill Bigelow.
The stories of twenty people whose lives were touched by the New Deal of the 1930s come to life in this classroom activity, intended to open students' minds to the possibilities of a Green New Deal.
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Teaching Activity. By Rachel Hanes. Rethinking Schools.
A 2nd-grade teacher shows how connecting a student's home to the classroom led to profound lessons for all her students — in this case, about pipelines and climate justice.
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Teaching Activity Draft. By Matt Reed and Tim Swinehart. 2019.
Students learn the names and stories of dozens of climate justice activists.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools. 13 pages.
Through encountering "clues," students probe the dangerous link between fossil fuels, carbon, and climate change.
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Teaching Activity. By WorldOregon's Young Leaders in Action.
In this role-play, students explore the challenges and perspectives of people — climate refugees — who have "no option except escape" from homes devastated by climate change.
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Teaching Activity. By Brady Bennon. Rethinking Schools. 7 pages.
A high school humanities teacher introduces students to the human cost of climate change, building empathy for climate change refugees like those in the island nation of Kiribati.
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Teaching Activity. By Alma Anderson McDonald.
A teacher looks back on her childhood to discover the meaning of environmental racism. Linda Christensen offers ways to teach about this story with students.
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Teaching Activity. By Flannery Denny. Rethinking Schools, Summer 2019.
A math educator brings data from a friend’s solar panels — and the story to win them in their community — into her 7th-grade classroom to build a bridge between math and climate justice education.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, Bill Bigelow, and Andrew Duden. Article by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca. Rethinking Schools. 15 pages.
A role play helps students recognize the issues at stake in the historic struggle of the Standing Rock Sioux to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools.
A role play introduces students to 22 individuals around the world — each of whom is affected differently by climate change.
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Teaching Activity. By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca.
A lesson about multiple cohorts of climate activists: Indigenous leaders in the Climate Justice Movement, valve turners using civil disobedience to stop the flow of oil, and the legal team that uses the “necessity defense” in the courts.
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Teaching Activity. By Rosemarie Frascella. Rethinking Schools.
Our extractive fossil fuel-based economy has always demanded that some people’s homes and health be sacrificed for the benefit of more privileged and powerful others. This article explores how one teacher engages her students in thinking about how “sacrifice zones” play out in their lives.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. 2009. Rethinking Schools.
The environmental crisis requires a profound social and curricular rethinking.
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Teaching Activity & Article. By Michelle Nicola. Rethinking Schools.
Using Marshallese poet and climate justice activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Dear Matafele Peinam,” a teacher helps 7th graders think about the sacred spaces in their own lives and how they will be affected by climate change.
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Teaching Activity. By Bill Bigelow. Rethinking Schools.
The Thingamabob Game helps students grasp the essential relationship between climate and capitalism.
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Teaching Activity. By Eric Fishman. Rethinking Schools.
An elementary school teacher developed the engaging Quetzal Conundrum game to help students understand the impact of climate change in Costa Rica.
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Teaching Activity. By Caneisha Mills.
This people’s tribunal begins with the premise that a heinous crime is being committed as tens of millions of people’s lives are in danger due to COVID-19. But who was responsible for this crime? Students weigh the evidence.
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Teaching Activity. By Rowan Shafer. Rethinking Schools.
A teacher adapts the “Climate Change Mixer” designed for older students as a springboard for a unit on global warming and climate justice. She asks, "How could I bring up an issue so big and abstract, so gloom and doom, with 3rd graders? How could I not?"
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