CLIMATE SCIENCE

People's beliefs about social, cultural, and political identities often influence how they see
climate change, its causes, and its implications. Researchers set out to comprehend how pupils
in conservative locales grasp and engage with climate science in relation to their locales in light
of this pattern. They next thought about how to persuade students who could be resistant to
learning about the issue.
/The educators contend that climate change education strategies that place a heavy
emphasis on the breadth and strength of scientific evidence may not be successful. They
advocate a wider shift in addressing rural students' identities and political and cultural
economies along with scientific investigations of climate change and its local impacts after years
of teaching courses on the social and cultural implications of climate change and researching
the outcomes of those courses.
The research team looked at the difficulties in educating students about climate change in
environments that can be unfriendly to such messages because they are seen as threats to
political and cultural identity.

Relating to rural kids

“According to Joseph Henderson, a lecturer in the environment and society department at Paul
Smith's College, "one of the things that led to the production of our research is a concern that
science education as it was currently being practiced wasn't paying close enough attention to
some of the issues that are happening in rural communities." Henderson emphasizes the need
for teachers to deal with political power dynamics in their work in order to mitigate the
polarizing effects of group think.
Teachers of elementary grades and secondary education where both students come from
similar cultural and physical areas to the places they teach and can relate to the struggles that
people in those rural areas endure. Their commitments to scientific knowledge and
environmental development clash with the cultural values of their neighbors and families, as
well as the roles that extractive industries have played in their communities' lives.

They explain their efforts to teach climate change in rural, conservative populations using an
autoethnographic study methodology. Then, based on his research on addressing epistemic
difficulties in discussions about political issues, Kevin Meuwissen, associate professor and chair
of teaching and curriculum at the Warner School of Education at the University of Rochester,
synthesizes their efforts and suggests ways to improve such teaching.
They discovered that the best way to teach and learn about climate change is to delve deeper
into the social, political, and cultural understandings that accompany their students'
interactions with the subject. They did this by conducting a thorough comparative analysis of
course materials, including syllabi, lesson plans, course assignments, student essays, and
classroom discourse over four years. The group is aware of the necessity to show how the
climate catastrophe is related to patterns of human activity on a local and global scale.

/ They argue in their paper that climate change hasn't just arisen naturally. It is the outcome of
a combination of human choices and historical patterns of colonization, resource extraction,
economic production, and political power.

"Many of my students had never considered climate change in that way. If they have learned it
at all, they have learned that we (humans) burn carbon, according to Henderson. That's not
how complicated it is. You need to learn about the political, social, and cultural factors that
have shaped the world in order to comprehend it. It's crucial to support pupils in understanding
their place in that larger complexity.”

‘Mirror and window’

Teachers have been able to position themselves alongside their students in ways that make
sense to them by connecting to the backgrounds of their pupils and understanding the cultural
commitments in their communities.

With that minor change in the story, Long explains, "you see that you haven't harmed anybody,
but you can also take an honest stand for a better future." They are aware of it. Instead of
telling them, "You are evil because you think this way," it's about the story and how you convey
it, as well as how you envision their resolving the issue in the future.
Us vs them" is a prevalent way of thinking and acting in today's political and social structures,
yet it can be detrimental to the practice of teaching. Then, Meuwissen continues, "educators'
attempts to influence people's opinions or to communicate with one another will fail if students
feel humiliated or denigrated—or like they belong to an outgroup in the classroom. This is
because students who feel isolated will notice what is happening to them. And as a result of
these interactions, they will change in order to safeguard their identities and group allegiances.
Then, educators engage students in critical dialogues about how their cultural
commitments and perceptions about climate science interact in order to assist students avoid
negative outcomes. "There are opportunities to explore how motivated cognition plays into
their learning, which doesn't happen with talk that centers on scientific studies and evidence
alone, when students talk about the most important aspects of who they are, whom they trust,
and why, the stakes associated with protecting their worldviews and values, and how that all
plays into their thoughts and interactions related to climate and the environment.
The research demonstrates some of the limitations of these methods, such as the persistence
of ecofascist attitudes and actions in the face of them. With people like this, you can only get so
far, yet you still make progress. The important thing is that we all need to work together more
in the future.
Are we attempting to address every issue? I doubt it. However, we are attempting to find a way
to coexist in a nation with people who hold divergent views in order to find solutions to issues
that affect us all. And the majority of our students concur with that.
Environmental politics are essential to environmental research, and it takes careful thought and
a coordinated cross-disciplinary approach to comprehend the consequences of that.