About the author

Sara Karn, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow for Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future, based at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Her research explores historical empathy in social studies and history education, and she teaches environmental education to pre-service teachers. Personal website: https://sarakarn25.wordpress.com/.

Sample guiding question and activity

Guiding question: How might the perspectives, successes, and setbacks of environmental activists in the past offer us stories of hope and resilience for today?

Activity: Teach students about art activism and show examples by environmental activists during different decades. Consider how the artwork and the issues they represent have changed over time. Have students create their own artwork that captures emotions and represents environmental issues they care about.

A display of climate emotions-inspired artwork created by preservice teachers in an environmental education course in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada).

Chapter overview

History has an important role to play in helping the Climate Generation navigate the emotional aspects of ecological degradation and social injustice in the age of climate disruption. This chapter presents a series of guiding questions and activities that K-12 and postsecondary educators can use to address the affective dimensions of climate change histories, while fostering empathy and care towards humans and more-than-humans in the past and present. The activities encourage students—including those who may be apathetic to climate change—to empathize with human and more-than-human experiences over time, care about diverse perspectives, and express their feelings about environmental injustices. The guiding questions can be applied to different historical contexts to generate discussions and support students’ emotional connections to the past. Together they highlight how learning about the past can inform our present and future as we face the uncertainties of climate crisis.

Quote from the chapter

“While typical approaches to history are centred around content knowledge and historical thinking, learning about the past also involves engagement with affective elements, including empathy and care”.

Other resources for feeling climate change in history

• Lessons and activities created by the Social Studies & History Education in the Anthropocene Network: https://sshean.ca/resources/.  

• A collection of impact-focused photographs to teach about climate change: https://climatevisuals.org/.

• Zinn Education Project Climate Crisis Timeline: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/climate-crisis-has-a-history/.

Video transcript

Hello! Thank you for your interest in learning more about my chapter “Empathy and Care: Activities for Feeling Climate Change.” I thought I’d make a short video to share a bit about my research and teaching journey that led to writing this chapter for the Existential Toolkit.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been learning and teaching about history. I’m certified to teach K-12 in Ontario, Canada. I also recently completed my PhD in education at Queen’s University and my dissertation explored historical empathy within history education in Canada. And now, as a postdoctoral fellow, I’m working for Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future, a pan-Canadian research project examining the state of K-12 history education in provinces and territories across Canada. So you could say that I spend a lot of time thinking about teaching and learning history.

But more recently I’ve started thinking about how history might be able to help us navigate some of the most challenging issues of today, including the climate crisis. As a graduate student, I was a research assistant for my PhD supervisor, Dr. Heather McGregor, and as part of her project we were reimagining history and social studies education for the Anthropocene. With our team, the Social Studies & History Education in the Anthropocene Network (or SSHEAN for short), we designed lessons bringing together critical and historical thinking, activity guides and prompts, and other resources for history educators. Many of these resources also centred feelings and emotions.

At the same time, I was delving into my own research on empathy in history education. And I found that, within Canada, the affective dimensions of learning about the past weren’t really being considered in the scholarly literature. There wasn’t a lot of emphasis on empathizing with others or caring about people (whether people in the past or others around us in the present). What I found from talking with history teachers is that they felt like they didn’t have a lot of support or resources for approaching feelings and emotions in the history classroom.

When the opportunity came to submit to the Existential Toolkit collection, I decided to bring together these two areas of my research and teaching interests, and propose this chapter focused on feeling climate change in history education. Many of the guiding questions and activities were inspired by conversations I had with other teachers, those of us working on the SSHEAN project, and my own teaching experiences. Some of them have been facilitated with students before and others are offered as possibilities for what could be. While I was teaching an environmental education course for pre-service teachers, I had an opportunity to try out some of the new activities. I had my students learn about the power of art for transformative learning experiences and engagement with climate emotions, and they created their own artwork that expressed their feelings and emotions about the climate crisis. I’ve featured some of their artwork on this webpage about my chapter, so you can see their responses. One that stood out to me, that incorporated history…the student painted a graph line showing global temperatures over time and used it as a “timeline” to then paint different species along it that have become endangered or extinct over time. The colours and techniques used expressed this student’s feelings about climate change—mostly dark, representing despair and anxiety, with some yellow in one corner to indicate hope for the future.

And on the note of hope…I hope that you’ll consider reading this chapter for other ideas of questions and activities you might incorporate into your history and social studies classes. And I should say that a lot of the ideas are cross-curricular or interdisciplinary so they can be taken up in relation to other subject areas too. So happy reading and I’d love to hear from you if you try out any of the activities!