Summer climate around Germany and a song "In Spring" by F. Schubert: A report of an interdisciplinary lesson practice toward promoting students’ perception of changing climate and understanding of the heterogeneous others

As also mentioned at EGU2025, to promote the students’ ability to perceive how the climate has been changing and how it is likely to change in the future is an essential base for the Climate Change Education (CCE) in ESD (Education for Sustainable Development). Besides, the detailed seasonal cycles show rather different features from region to region, even within middle and higher latitudes and the changing climate in each area could be sometimes more easily recognized as the “distortion of the seasonal cycle” also by the non-experts. Thus, in the CCE, deeper understanding of the detailed seasonal cycles themselves would be also necessary.

By the way, interdisciplinary approach by collaboration with the art such as music sometimes gives a great help to understand the variety of the regional climate including the detailed seasonal cycles, through the deeper appreciation of the related seasonal feeling. In addition, selection of the study areas not so familiar to the students could also lead to their understanding of the heterogeneous others. Based on the above concepts, interdisciplinary approach including the lesson practice at the university was made on a topic of the climate and songs of the special season spring/May around Germany, at the viewpoint of comparison with those around Japan, at EGU2025.

However, we can find out the various regional differences of the climatic features and the seasonal feelings for the other stages of the cycle, such as the summer, autumn, and so on. For example, while the temperature in midsummer (around August) is much higher than in May in the Japan Islands area, the seasonal mean temperature does not increase so much from May to midsummer (June to August) around Germany. Besides, rather cool days also appear frequently as the large day-to-day variation even during summer around Germany. As such, we will focus our attention to the summer climate and the seasonal feeling around Germany and will report here an interdisciplinary approach on that topic including the characteristics of the musical expression of that song and results of the lesson practice at the university in Japan in 2022 and 2025.

In the lesson practice, the summer climate and seasonal cycle around Germany were firstly explained and the German song “Im Frühling” (In spring) composed by F. Schubert was appreciated, paying attention to how the scenes and emotions expressed by the lyrics “all summer long” in the 3rd verse of this song might differ from each other whether we imagine the climate around Germany or that around Japan. The present activity seems to have provided an opportunity for the students to perceive the climate environments and seasonal feelings quite different from those familiar to them. However, a problem how to explore the appreciation activities also on the musical expression itself for the students not specialized in music remained in 2022 lesson and we performed again in 2025. In this presentation, the results of the lesson in 2022 and 2025 will be also briefly introduced.