Vision
Teach Earth Action believes faculty from across the disciplines can reimagine their teaching to confront the Climate Crisis. TEA believes that faculty and their respective institutions must leverage the great untapped resource that is hiding in plain sight on every campus--students. When students first hear about the Climate Crisis, they invariably ask 2 questions:
Why didn’t anyone tell me?
What can I do?
Teach Earth Action’s vision for educational reform ensures that the answer to #2 is you can do a lot.
Statement of Need
Mother Earth is under siege: climate change, pollution, resource abuse, extinction. The issues that impact Earth amount to an eco-battle for the very future of this planet. Human-caused climate change is wiping out millions of species of flora and fauna that call this planet home. We wake up each morning in the middle of what scientists call “The 6th Extinction.”
Humans are also suffering: disease, displacement, and shocking poverty. This is self-inflicted damage caused by mistreatment of our only home. Communities of color and low-income communities are on the front lines of these eco-battles, and are most impacted by environmental injustices.
But because we are so cut off from the natural rhythms of the planet, and from each other, our awareness of these issues is attenuated. Matters are made worse by the regrettable phenomenon of Climate Silence which makes it almost taboo to speak up about these calamities. Added to this, is the irony that on the one hand we don’t talk about the Climate Crisis enough, while on the other hand we have become numb to the steady barrage of environmental upheaval.
An endless stream of scientific reports warns us we cannot sustain our current way of life. Teach Earth Action believes that this admonition also applies to our educational systems. We cannot--and should not--sustain our current way of providing education in the face of the Climate Crisis. It is a woefully inadequate response to these existential challenges.
This is an all-hands-on-deck moment in planetary history. But how should educators respond to the Climate Crisis?
Teach Earth Action’s Vision for Faculty and Colleges
In Spring 2019, a National Public Radio poll revealed that 86% of teachers think that climate change should be taught in schools. A similar number of parents agree--including 67% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats. However, only 42% of teachers actually address climate change in their classes. And most of these teachers do so only intermittently.
Teach Earth Action agrees with these parents and teachers that this is indeed an all-hands-on-deck moment in planetary history and educators should play a much bigger role in responding to the Climate Crisis. But how?
To answer this question, Teach Earth Action has developed a comprehensive suite of teaching strategies that faculty and institutions can choose from. These strategies lean upon each other and grow out of each other. They are adaptable and customizable; a teacher can try out one of them one time, or a teacher can make them the foundation of her teaching career.
These strategies are explained in depth on this website, and TEA offers real-world examples of them being implemented. These strategies include:
TEA trains and supports teachers from across the disciplines to “climatize” their curriculum
TEA supports teachers to develop opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration to address the Climate Crisis
TEA trains faculty to integrate the power of Action Learning into their teaching
TEA encourages and supports teachers to go “beyond the classroom” and to address real issues on the campus and in the community
All these strategies are predicated on the fact that while TEACHING students about climate change is crucial, it is not nearly enough. These strategies support teachers, students, and institutions to TAKE ACTION in the face of the climate crisis. By invoking these strategies, you: solve problems, create community, build expertise, empower citizens, scale change.
Academic disciplines do not always tailor their content to address local issues. TEA provides support for faculty to pivot their teaching to address the challenges local communities experience. Any academic discipline can be leveraged to execute actionable solutions to the stark inequalities caused by the Climate Crisis that many communities face.
TEA supports faculty, institutions, and students to address the environmental issues that directly impact these students, their families and the wider community. These strategies rest on the premise that in order to repair our planet we need to--in a truly visceral and vital way--engage with and help to heal the natural world that surrounds us.
Achieving the Vision
The Teach Earth Action team deeply understands that the educational strategies we propose to address the climate crisis are very ambitious. TEA also understands that for many faculty the strategies proposed may require a significant adjustment of their teaching. In short TEA is asking faculty and institutions to clear a very high, and perhaps different, bar.
That said, the Climate Crisis that we all want to ameliorate is monumental. Business--or rather, Teaching--as usual just won't work. Further, members of the TEA team have employed every one of these strategies ourselves…many times over. We would not dream of blithely sharing this or that strategy without knowing that it works. In fact, we are so sure these strategies work, that we crave to share them with fellow educational practitioners.
And yet the TEA team does not merely rely on our own anecdotal teaching experiences. To ensure YOUR success in employing these strategies, the TEA team:
Engages stakeholder perspectives about theories of change
Has developed teaching pillars for supporting faculty
Collects and synthesizes research on how teachers best respond to the Climate Crisis
Shares educational products that seed change
Provides lesson plans, and examples of past projects
Evaluates and fine-tunes our facilitation techniques
Customizes our support to meet your particular teaching situation
Supports you to navigate your institution as you create exciting learning opportunities
TEA’s work resides at the heart of where change in higher education needs to happen if we hope to confront the Climate Crisis: in curriculum, in faculty’s sense of student capacity, in the connections faculty and students make when they move beyond the classroom, in the problems solved and opportunities uncovered.
And as you engage in your work, TEA’s support for you is anchored by these conceptual pillars:
Love and Capacity
Student Voice and Making Visible
Design and Practices
Curriculum and Pedagogy re-design
Space and Navigation
Equity and Just Transitions
Action Learning and Beyond the Classroom
These concepts--these pillars--have guided TEA’s work over 15 years of providing professional development support to faculty across California and the nation. No matter what is being taught, these pillars invigorate and empower both teacher and student. And yet, as TEA works with you to achieve the vision of truly confronting the Climate Crisis with every fiber of our professional beings, these pillars are especially useful.
TEA’s approach to Professional Development
What is lacking in so much educational reform is profound professional development that leads to personal and cultural changes that are sustainable after the reform agents depart the scene. TEA’s emphasis is on accompanying curriculum change with relationship-centered professional development tailored to local campus culture. This approach aligns with the findings of research groups like MDRC and CCRC whose studies show that merely implementing structural changes or dropping off a best practice or “proven” model to faculty in colleges is not enough. TEA’s leaders are working faculty with decades of experience in the classroom, as well as extensive knowledge about how to successfully implement educational reforms and initiatives. We put this experience to work for you.
TEA dignifies faculty expertise in our professional development interactions, even while we encourage faculty to engage in dramatically new ways of thinking about their craft. Each situation we walk into is complex, so we attend closely to the people and dynamics involved. To be honest, we arrive a little bit nervous at every event we hold, even though we’ve been doing this a long time. We don’t want to screw up. Or screw you up. We don't want to waste your time. We learn from every faculty member we meet, and every event we facilitate. We believe in flattened hierarchy with students and certainly with fellow faculty. We will tell you what we think, we will offer any wisdom that we might have stumbled across, and we will also try to get you comfortably off-balance so that you can figure out for yourself what you think.
TEA believes that no educational reform is sustainable unless faculty are encouraged to be creative and trusted locally to make their own sense out of teaching and learning. We have seen over and over that faculty and administrators bring high engagement and enthusiasm to the TEA approach; the results are dramatic curriculum change and educational paradigm shifts.
Most teachers have implemented some of the approaches to teaching and learning that TEA shares. So to that extent, our work with you is quite pragmatic. Building upon that, what we offer is an invitation for teachers to develop a more self-reflective awareness of these approaches, and to integrate them into their classrooms in a more systematic manner.
Teach Earth Action’s Organizational Goals
The vision of TEA is to create an institute-like structure that provides professional development and Action Learning support to colleges across California and the nation in service of protecting the planet. TEA’s leaders know their disciplines; they are deeply familiar with the research on the Climate Crisis, as well as the most effective professional development approaches, and on the most effective teaching and learning strategies that grow out of TEA’s approach to PD.
TEA knows the California community college system, the debates and the politics; we have worked with hundreds of faculty who have impacted thousands of students. We also have collaborated for years with other organizations and major stakeholders across the state and country in a variety of initiatives. TEA’s organizational goals include:
✶ Expand the number of colleges with which we are working. There is a real hunger across to implement far-reaching change in how teachers and institutions adapt and evolve to respond to the Climate Crisis. Over the last 20 years, TEA’s founders have created numerous programs and grant-funded initiatives. In doing so, they have nurtured good working relationships with faculty and administrators in over half of California’s 112 community colleges and with dozens of other colleges around the country.
✶ Become a deep resource to help inform faculty, colleges, as well as the wider communities that these colleges serve. From the start, TEA has been creating compelling quantitative and qualitative representations. These include a robust website, articles, numerous videos, training documents, and more.
✶ Support and integrate with other promising initiatives where our pedagogical and educational philosophies align. TEA has close ties with numerous organizations around the state who are engaged in the work of solving the Climate Crisis. TEA’s goal is to grow these relationships, expand the partners and arenas in which we work, and connect these players to each other.
✶ Bring Climate Equity to the center of the discussion on education. TEA believes that Justice for the planet is inseparable from Justice for our most at-risk, underserved, and indigenous communities. TEA’s goal in this space is to support stakeholders to make these considerations central to their curriculum and initiative development.
✶ Establish a thriving network of practitioners. Across our constituent schools this is happening already in an organic way; we have in mind numerous strategies for more formally supporting this development. Currently we connect teams/schools across our network through emails, conference calls, sharing of each other’s materials, setting up campus visits, and regional gatherings.