Workshop: Teaching Climate Change
Leader: SueEllen Campbell, Colorado State University
Meets on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 23
Description
Climate change is everybody’s business: one way or another, this is a planetary crisis that will affect all of our lives and demand many kinds of understandings and skills. We need to move beyond business as usual, perhaps radically so: as scholars, we need to stop talking only to each other, and as teachers, we need to do much more than analyze the discourse, a twin to the dangerously evasive tactic of teaching the controversy. We owe it to our students to face the problem with them.
But how to start? How can we best alter our teaching to tackle this challenge?
If you want to include climate change in the courses you teach, this workshop is for you—whether you want to add the subject to an existing course or design a whole term on the subject; whether you focus on texts that are contemporary or older, canonical or popular, regional or global; whether you teach intro-to-lit and composition classes at a rural community college or graduate seminars on literary theory or ecocriticism at a top-tier urban university.
We will consider some key questions that underlie our practical decisions. Why have the humanities and arts been slow in engaging with the topic of climate change, even slower in moving beyond academic business as usual? Do our disciplinary assumptions and habits get in our way? Or do we simply not yet clearly see what we have to offer? Can we do anything important that can’t be done, or is rarely done, by, say, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, or ethicists? If we want to engage with climate change, especially if we want to lessen its severity, to imagine and help create a better future, can we do so not just as ordinary individuals but also as specialists with useful expertise to bring to bear? What expertise might that be?
Our primary focus, though, will be on practice. I will talk briefly about some of the best resources I have found as co-director of a multidisciplinary climate-change program and creator and curator of its website. We will survey some reasons the subject is intimidating, think about materials that might help, consider how this subject can fit into what we already know how to do or could learn to do. We will consider communication, expertise, morale, and ethical issues. And we will talk about the texts that have worked well for us in classrooms, including those that have nothing overtly to do with climate change.
We will likely begin our four hours as a whole group, then move into a series of small groups with similar interests and teaching assignments, and close with a conversation about what we might have to offer a world in crisis.
Preparation
I would like to hit the ground running. So before you come, please consider the questions above—and any other related questions you have yourself.
And please, BY JUNE 5, send me two things:
My email address is sueellen.campbell@colostate.edu.
I will collect all these SINGLE PAGES, consolidate them into as few files as I can, and email them to all participants by June 10th, after which date I will be travelling off-grid until the conference. Then we can all read everybody else’s pages before the workshop.
Workshop Leader’s Biography
I have nearly forty years of experience teaching in university English departments, on a wide range of subjects (including literary theory, 20th century fiction and nonfiction, environmental literature, and creative-nonfiction/nature/environmental writing). My most recent book is The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture.
About a decade ago, I became deeply concerned about climate change, and in 2007, with my colleague John Calderazzo, I started a multidisciplinary education and outreach program, Changing Climates @ Colorado State University. We have run some 120 talks on campus, given by well over a hundred different speakers from twenty-eight academic departments, all eight academic colleges, and numerous other entities, to audiences of over 6,000 faculty, students, and community members. We offer communication training to young scientists who want to become more comfortable and effective speaking to the public. And I run the website 100 Views of Climate Change (http://changingclimates.colostate.edu). This collection of over 450 annotated multidisciplinary resources currently includes twenty-three topical pages; it is aimed at non-specialist adults, including college-level teachers and students, so all resources are up-to-date, high-quality, readable, and often lively.
Meets on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 23
Description
Climate change is everybody’s business: one way or another, this is a planetary crisis that will affect all of our lives and demand many kinds of understandings and skills. We need to move beyond business as usual, perhaps radically so: as scholars, we need to stop talking only to each other, and as teachers, we need to do much more than analyze the discourse, a twin to the dangerously evasive tactic of teaching the controversy. We owe it to our students to face the problem with them.
But how to start? How can we best alter our teaching to tackle this challenge?
If you want to include climate change in the courses you teach, this workshop is for you—whether you want to add the subject to an existing course or design a whole term on the subject; whether you focus on texts that are contemporary or older, canonical or popular, regional or global; whether you teach intro-to-lit and composition classes at a rural community college or graduate seminars on literary theory or ecocriticism at a top-tier urban university.
We will consider some key questions that underlie our practical decisions. Why have the humanities and arts been slow in engaging with the topic of climate change, even slower in moving beyond academic business as usual? Do our disciplinary assumptions and habits get in our way? Or do we simply not yet clearly see what we have to offer? Can we do anything important that can’t be done, or is rarely done, by, say, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, or ethicists? If we want to engage with climate change, especially if we want to lessen its severity, to imagine and help create a better future, can we do so not just as ordinary individuals but also as specialists with useful expertise to bring to bear? What expertise might that be?
Our primary focus, though, will be on practice. I will talk briefly about some of the best resources I have found as co-director of a multidisciplinary climate-change program and creator and curator of its website. We will survey some reasons the subject is intimidating, think about materials that might help, consider how this subject can fit into what we already know how to do or could learn to do. We will consider communication, expertise, morale, and ethical issues. And we will talk about the texts that have worked well for us in classrooms, including those that have nothing overtly to do with climate change.
We will likely begin our four hours as a whole group, then move into a series of small groups with similar interests and teaching assignments, and close with a conversation about what we might have to offer a world in crisis.
Preparation
I would like to hit the ground running. So before you come, please consider the questions above—and any other related questions you have yourself.
And please, BY JUNE 5, send me two things:
- A very short description of what you teach and how you are interested in adding more climate change material to your teaching. I will use this information to plan small group topics and gatherings.
- NO MORE THAN ONE PAGE of something you have to contribute to our workshop conversation: ideas, questions, book annotations, a reading list, a successful assignment, a resource or two, a provocative image, anything you think others might find useful. NO KIDDING: do keep to ONE PAGE, or I will either send it back for editing or cut it down for you, depending on how much extra time you leave me.
My email address is sueellen.campbell@colostate.edu.
I will collect all these SINGLE PAGES, consolidate them into as few files as I can, and email them to all participants by June 10th, after which date I will be travelling off-grid until the conference. Then we can all read everybody else’s pages before the workshop.
Workshop Leader’s Biography
I have nearly forty years of experience teaching in university English departments, on a wide range of subjects (including literary theory, 20th century fiction and nonfiction, environmental literature, and creative-nonfiction/nature/environmental writing). My most recent book is The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science, and Culture.
About a decade ago, I became deeply concerned about climate change, and in 2007, with my colleague John Calderazzo, I started a multidisciplinary education and outreach program, Changing Climates @ Colorado State University. We have run some 120 talks on campus, given by well over a hundred different speakers from twenty-eight academic departments, all eight academic colleges, and numerous other entities, to audiences of over 6,000 faculty, students, and community members. We offer communication training to young scientists who want to become more comfortable and effective speaking to the public. And I run the website 100 Views of Climate Change (http://changingclimates.colostate.edu). This collection of over 450 annotated multidisciplinary resources currently includes twenty-three topical pages; it is aimed at non-specialist adults, including college-level teachers and students, so all resources are up-to-date, high-quality, readable, and often lively.
