“Climate crisis and its impact: New ways to awaken curiosity and hope in the classroom environment”

Teaching about the ongoing climate crisis feels many times emotionally exhausting. This is particularly because it is often sensed that a large number of our students are hopeless about climate change and its impact. In our experience, we have also recognized that classroom discussions may result in misleading conclusions, namely that “if there is hope, is not for us”.  

Therefore, in recent years, I have been trying to explore new methods to approach this subject. I have searched how students' interest about climate crisis, i.e., global warming and climate change, as well as their engagement as citizens to deal with climate crisis could be awakened.

The aspects that I have particularly explored are as follows:

1).Geological field studies together with scientists provides new insights into climate crisis

Since 2013, I have been working on several projects in collaboration with researchers at the Department of Geological Sciences at Stockholm University. This collaboration began when I participated in a Research Council. Since then, I have been co-leading several projects, which had resulted in that many of my students participated in scientific activities, including making observations, collecting data, and doing fieldwork. By doing fieldwork my students have got new insights into and the time to reflect over the present as well as the past climate changes. This is a way of learning that the “climate crisis” is in fact “a geological problem”.

2). Engagement creates hope

I have been involving my students in several cultural projects where they had the opportunity to express their thoughts about climate crisis to politicians, dream about future solutions, and to search why other people in the society make their voice heard through climate demonstrations. By participating and expressing their thoughts in such activities, my students realized that they could contribute making “Earth a wonderful planet to live on”. For examples, a group of them participated in a workshop co-organized by Stockholm University, the Researchers’ Desk, and Lava at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern. The students created textile messages to politicians and decision makers about climate change.

In another project, my students have participated in the research project “Utopian stories”, a collaboration between the Department of Literary Studies and the Centre of Digital Humanities at the University of Gothenburg and the Bolin Centre for Climate Research at Stockholm University and the Nobel Prize Museum.