As feelings of eco-grief and climate anxiety grow, educators are grappling with how to help students learn about the violent systems causing climate change while simultaneously navigating the emotions this knowledge elicits. This book provides resources for developing emotional and existential tenacity in college classrooms so that students can stay engaged.
Featuring insights from scholars, educators, activists, artists, game designers, and others who are integrating emotional wisdom into climate justice education, this user-friendly guide offers a robust menu of interdisciplinary, plug-and-play teaching strategies, lesson plans, and activities to support student transformation and build resilience. The book also includes reflections from students who have taken classes that incorporate their emotions in the curricula. Galvanizing and practical, The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators will equip both educators and their students with tools for advancing climate justice.
Scroll down to learn more the book’s content. Each chapter will take you to extra resources put together by the author(s) themselves, which you may find helpful in your teaching, study and research.
Resources from Selected Chapters
Part I - Getting Started with Emotions in the Climate Justice Classroom
3 Leslie Davenport, “Transformative Psychological Approaches to Climate Education”
4 Jessica D. Pratt, “From Existential Crisis to Action Planning – Building Individual and Community Resilience”
5 Sara Karn, “Empathy and Care: Activities for Feeling Climate Change”
6 Christie Manning, “The Emotional Impact Statement”
7 Dan Suarez, Sophie Chalfin-Jacobs, Hannah Gokaslan, Sidra Pierson, and Annaliese Terlesky, “The Politics of Hope”
Part III - Embodied Pedagogies
14 Panu Pihkala, “Working with Ecological Emotions: Mind Map and Spectrum Line”
15 Emily (Em) Wright, “Building Somatic Awareness to Respond to Climate-Related Trauma”
Part V - Unsettling Pedagogies: Discomfort and Difficult Knowledge
22 Kimberly Skye Richards, “Critical Journalism, Creative Activism, and a Pedagogy of Discomfort”
23 Jennifer Ladino, “Why Worry? The Utility of Fear for Climate Justice”
24 Audrey Bryan, “The Social Ecology of Responsibility: Navigating the Epistemic and Affective Dimensions of the Climate Crisis”
25 Marek Oziewicz, “Beyond the Accountability Paradox: Climate Guilt and the Systemic Drivers of Climate Change”
Part VII - Community, Collaboration, and Kinship
33 Sonya Remington Doucette and Heather Price, “Climate Justice and Civic Engagement Across the Curriculum to Empower Climate Action and Address Climate Grief”
35 Benjamin Bowman, Chloé Germaine, Pooja Kishinani, and Charlie Balchin, “The Climate Imaginary: Reading Fiction to Make Sense of the Climate Crisis”
Part II - Justice as Affective Pedagogy
10 Carlie Trott, “Photovoice for the Climate Justice Classroom: Inviting Students’ Affective and Sociopolitical Engagement”
11 Michelle Garvey, “Leveraging Affect for Climate Justice”
16 Magdalena Mączyńska, “Using Poetry to Resist Alienation in the Climate Change Classroom”
Part IV - Futurity, Narrative, and the Imagination: Visualizing What We Desire
19 Peter Friederici, “Overcoming the Tragic”
20 April Anson, “Practicing Speculative Futures”
Part VI - Joy and Resilience as Resistance
26 Casey Meehan, “Joyful Climate Work: The Power of Play in a Time of Worry and Fear”
28 Jessica Creane, “Teaching Climate Change Resilience Through Play”
30 Terry Harpold, “Releasing Growth”
31 Marna Hauk, “Ecotopia versus Zombie Apocalypse: Collaborative Writing Games for Existential Regeneration”
Part VIII - These Skills Are Needed in the World: Career Planning for the Climate Generation
36 Debra J. Rosenthal, Jeffrey Johansen, and Ruth Jacob, “Assignment: ‘How Will Climate Change Affect My Career?’”
Reviews
"The authors put language to many of the ways students and educators are traversing this moment in planetary history. The perspectives presented in these chapters will help educators across multiple disciplines build a meaningful curriculum for navigating climate uncertainty and anxiety."—Jessica L. Thompson, Professor at the College of Business, Northern Michigan University.
"The Existential Toolkit provides a necessary framework for environmental educators to understand and respond to our students’ (and our own) environmental distress. From new research to pedagogical tools and skill-building, this book will be an invaluable resource for environmental studies teachers for a long time to come."—Jade Sasser, author of Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future.
"This book is destined to become a well-worn field guide for environmental educators worldwide, and the need for it at this time can't be overstated. Educators who are daunted by their students' climate anxiety, despair, or outrage, and instructors who feel like throwing up their hands at the complexity of what it means to teach well in the polycrisis, will find many of their concerns addressed in this volume. Much more than a book about trauma-informed climate education (though it is also that), this is a mind-expanding read about justice, decolonization, and imagination, chock full of pedagogical interventions you can try in the classroom."—Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread and Director of CIRCLE (Community-minded Interventions for Resilience, Climate Leadership, and Emotional wellbeing) at Stanford Psychiatry.
"This book is a quilt of practical wisdom—generous offerings from those reshaping the classroom to meet the call of climate justice. We must better equip students for this time of trouble and transformation. Here, you'll find approaches to do so in abundance."—Katharine K. Wilkinson, coeditor of All We Can Save and lead writer of Drawdown.
"The way I think, teach, and feel about climate change has been permanently and positively altered by the extraordinary wisdom embodied in this powerful work of deep reflection, care, and healing."—David N. Pellow, author of What Is Critical Environmental Justice? and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara.
"This book offers concrete assignments and practices that not only advance emotional engagement with climate justice, but also practice climate justice. This new and important resource helps educators support and channel the emotions of all classroom participants toward building the world we need, and building relationships of support to live within crisis."—Corrie Grosse, author of Working across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction.
"This wide-ranging volume provides topics, perspectives, and tools to help educators in the vital project of teaching climate justice. It highlights the need to attend to social inequities and emphasizes the important role of emotions in enabling resilience and resistance in the face of climate change."—Susan Clayton, developer of the Climate Change Anxiety Scale.