Fikile Nxumalo writes about Planet Texas 2050 and how climate changes will negatively impact students in an article published in 2018.Office of the VP for Researc

Nxumalo, Fikile

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How climate change education ishurting the environmentDespite attempts by the Trump administration to bury it, a scientific reportreleased by several U.S. federal agencies is receiving a lot of attention. Thisreport presents a grim picture of the future of health, economic andenvironmental conditions in the United States without significant action on globalwarming.This news supports recent irrefutable scientific evidence presented by theUnited Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showing thatthe planet is in the midst of unprecedented human-caused environmentaldamage. Within the next twelve years, in the absence of drastic measures, theplanet faces an alarming acceleration of climate change impacts including theextinction of several plant and animal species, intensifying air pollution, increasedextreme weather events and an increased risk of drought. UNICEF has alsorecently named climate change as the biggest threat facing young childrenworldwide.Clearly the futures that young children are facing are ever more precariousamidst the ongoing and future effects of climate change. Given that, we shouldbe especially troubled by the vast divide that exists between currentenvironmental challenges and how climate change is taught to students in theUnited States. A comprehensive study in 2016 of U.S. middle and high schoolteachers found that not only was the time dedicated to climate change in scienceclasses shockingly low, a high percentage of teachers downplayed the humancauses of climate change.In my field of early childhood education, the situation is also concerning. Formore than a decade, fueled by concerns about the loss of children s̓ connectionswith nature and risks of “nature-deficit disorder”, there s̓ been a proliferation ofnature preschools, forest kindergartens and garden schools in the U.S. andCanada. Since 2012 alone, nature-based preschools are estimated to have grown500 percent in the United States. Clearly there are benefits in getting children outside more during the school day.The lack of outdoor time for children in U.S. schools is indeed troubling. But theproblem is that many of these “nature” programs are actually reinforcing thesame human-centric and extractive relationships that have helped to precipitateour current environmental crisis.To begin with, the very idea of a “nature deficit disorder” perpetuates the valuingof nature for what it can do for humans — in this case, how nature benefits youngchildren s̓ development. Also, the notion that children need to be “returned” tonature sustains a Eurocentric view of nature as something “out there” andseparate from us humans, rather than considering the ways in which humans arealways a part of nature. As indigenous peoples throughout the Americas teachus, we are always a part of and in complex interdependent relations with nature.These relations include the ecologically damaged urban natures in which mostchildren already live, in contrast to the idealized ways in which children andnature are often represented. For example, a google image search of childrenand nature reveals a multitude of children pictured in pristine natureenvironments, also striking for the lack of diversity in the children pictured inthese images. This continues a long history of the idealization of children s̓relationships with nature, that has been traced back to influential European earlychildhood philosophers such as Jacques Rousseau.Rather than focusing on a return to an idyllic nature and childhood relationship,what is urgently needed is climate change education for young children that issituated within the actual ecological contexts in which all children s̓ everydaylives are situated — not just the natures that privileged children can access inforest kindergarten and preschools. We need education that values theknowledges and experiences that young children have of the environmentalchallenges facing their particular contexts.For example, in my current context of Austin, Texas, increased flooding is one ofthe effects of climate change that we are already facing. In my work witheducators and kindergarten children, we have been engaged in a year longinquiry on children s̓ relations with water as part of an international researchproject spanning the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, aimed atdeveloping climate change pedagogies with young children.We have spent time with children at a nearby urban creek, noticing the changesin this creek over the year and theorizing with children about the causes andeffects of flooding (and the accompanying increased waste flows at the creek)on human, plant and animal life in this place. In our efforts to develop lessinstrumental and more reciprocal relations with water, we have woven togetherwater pedagogies based on Western science, arts-based practices andindigenous relational knowledges.It is also important to implement climate change education that is culturallyrelevant and available to children from historically marginalized communities. Forexample, an indigenous STEAM summer program in Puget Sound nurtureschildren s̓ relations with nature that are grounded in indigenous knowledgesystems and ethos of reciprocity, interconnectedness and responsibility withnature. The hands-on outdoor curriculum is designed to bring children s̓attention to ecological challenges facing local communities such as tidal poolhealth and other impacts of the changing composition of the ocean. Workingwith indigenous teachers, artists, elders and scientists, the camp preparesindigenous children to address the changing ecologies that they along with non-indigenous children are inheriting.While these two examples are an illustration of ongoing climate changeeducation efforts; clearly much more is needed. Importantly, both of theexamples discussed above are in alternative education settings rather than inpublic school settings. In public school settings, it is difficult to imagine how theparadigm shifts that are required in how children are educated about theecological futures that they are inheriting can take place without systemicchange. This includes change in early learning curriculum requirements and inearly childhood teacher training. It is also particularly disheartening that currenttrends in early childhood education in the United States are towards lessopportunities for hands-on, exploratory and inquiry-based learning and moretowards long periods of seat work, high stakes testing and teacher-directedinstruction.However, just as the systemic changes needed to avert further climatecatastrophe are significant but not impossible, the changes I am arguing for hereare also not impossible. To illustrate this, I close with an example of a hopefulshift in early childhood curriculum policy. This example from the Ministry ofEducation in British Columbia, Canada is an in-process early learning frameworkdocument intended to guide (not prescribe) early childhood education practicesin the province.The document explicitly foregrounds its central intent as supporting educators toengage with the challenges faced by British Columbians including climatechange, waste emissions and mass species extinction. This document is doingthe difficult work of radically re-imagining the kinds of curriculum and pedagogythat are needed for young children inheriting ecologically challengedlifeworlds.We need these kinds of efforts in early childhood policy in the UnitedStates.Fikile Nxumalo is an assistant professor of education at the University of Texas atAustin and a Public Voice fellow with the OpEd Project.11/22/19, 10(58 AMPage 1 of 1

How climate change education is hurting the environment

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How climate change education is hurting the environment

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