[00:00:15] Amy H-L: I’m Amy Halpern-Laff.
[00:00:17] Jon M: And I’m Jon Moscow. Today, we have another recording from our collaborative project, Educating for the World We Want. Today’s episode features speakers from the third salon on Nature, Place, and Education. The speakers were Kerry Kirk Pflugh of the New Jersey School of Conservation. Tom Roderick, author of “Teaching for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education,” and Deb L. Morrison, a lead writer on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment, Report 7.
The first voice you’ll hear will be that of Dr.David Penberg introducing the speakers.
[00:00:53] David P: So, this is a very special morning. I think we have three very unique guests that span a cross-section of the K-16 world. Kerry Kirk Pflugh is the executive director of the New Jersey School of Conservation, which is an environmental learning center. She also comes with an extensive background with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. Tom Roderick is the author, most recently, of “Teach for Climate [Justice] : A Vision for Transforming Education,” and is the developer of the Teach for Climate Justice Project. He was also the founding executive director of the Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility. And finally, Deb L. Morrison is a learning designer and advisor at the University of Washington and a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment, Report 7.
So in speaking with our guests, there were three words that seemed to constantly circulate and rise to the surface: caretaking, stewardship, and community engagement. We’ve asked our guests to reflect on three guiding questions through the lens of climate change, not apocalyptically, but practically and pedagogically, in the form of actionable work that’s taking place in K-12 education. Those three questions, which, by the way, are in the chat, were as follows: “What does an education grounded in environmental justice, youth agency, stewardship, and care mean to you?” Second, “beyond fostering environmental and scientific literacy, how can we help children and youth experience a deep sense of interconnectedness and relationship with the living world?” And finally, “how do you nurture practices of care and stewardship and the lives of young people so that these become integral to their educational experience?” So with great pleasure. I turn the virtual floor over to Kerry Kirk Pflugh. Thank you.
[00:03:05] Kerry: Thank you, David. And good morning everyone. So, I work in an upland temperate forest on 240 acres on a historic Civilian Conservation Corps campus, where once the Ramapo Lenape people lived and traversed, and where in the 1600s, it was settled by the Dutch to farm and mine.
Here on our campus, you might see a black bear wander through from time to time or find a bobcat sunning itself on Rainbow Bridge. Or you may even see a beaver dragging a small aspen or pine branch into the water to its hidden den on any given day. You’ll also see a group of students wearing waders in Flat Brook turning over rocks, looking for macro invertebrates or taking heat measurements on various surfaces like a tree, the side of a building, or a boulder. You might even see them gathered in a group around an obstacle on our ASE courses, working as a team to solve a problem or a challenge.
This is a space where we’ve been delivering environmental education programming for 77 years. We’re the oldest year-round residential environmental education center in the country. We have served roughly 500,000 students and educators and researchers throughout our history, and we were established in 1949 as the state’s Outdoor Education Center in response to advocacy by a group of educators that have provided education programming to teachers and students ever since. Our goal is to empower students to realize that they can make a difference in their world by helping them believe that they can tackle environmental problems they’re facing, especially as it relates to climate change.
We have five program areas at the School of Conservation, including school programming, teacher professional development research, community organization programming, and public programming. Our school programs are primarily focused on elementary schools, usually the sixth grade, but we also serve younger students and high school students.
Prior to a school visit, we conduct community assessments, so we know where the students are coming from, and we can make the connection between the natural world that they’re going to be experiencing and where they live. Environmental concepts are integrated into the four curriculum areas of science, humanities, social studies, and recreation.
In 2023, we launched new innovative classes that aligned with the new climate change standards championed by former First Lady Tammy Murphy. When students arrive on our campus, we bring them to our gathering place for orientation. This is where we welcome them, let them know a little bit about ourselves, about the school, and what to expect while they’re there. We talk about the classes they’re going to take. And then my education director tells them that there’s magic on the campus. And she says that the magic is different for everyone who comes and that they have to open themselves to find it. So they go off to their classes of water ecology, climate change, or discovery hikes.
And at the end of the program, whether it’s a day trip or a multi-day program, they come back to share their experiences. One example I wanted to share with you is from a student who took a conservation photography class. She took a picture of Rainbow Bridge. And when she took the picture, there was a drop of water on her lens. When she developed the picture, it revealed that there was a rainbow on Rainbow Bridge, and she was so excited that she said that’s my magic. I found my magic.
The second area is teacher professional development. We offer roughly between eight and 10 programs annually, and I’m going to talk more about that in just a minute.
Our third area is research. We’ve established what we call a research consortium. We have seven colleges and universities that have signed on as members, and we’re always taking on more universities and colleges. This has opened up opportunities for field research by professors and internship possibilities for their students. With a signed agreement with Rutgers University that facilitates the consortium, we’ve been recognized by the college as its northern field station for research. We’re also part of the Climate Change Network that Rutgers manages by having a weather station on our campus.
The fourth area is community-based partnerships. Since 2023, we’ve invited mission-aligned organizations to use our campus for their workshops and trainings as well as programming. And this has helped us to develop relationships beyond school programs and has allowed us to expand our programming reach.
The fifth area we focus on is public programming. And through public programming, we extend our reach beyond schools to families in the area and around the state who want to engage in meaningful outdoor experiences. Our programs kind of run the gamut from science-based programming to recreation, and we operate these mostly on the weekends.
So I want to take a little more time and talk about the professional development program that we offer. Although the school of conservation has provided pre-service training going back as far as 1949 for teachers, and experiential learning for elementary school students since the 1960s, it wasn’t until 1989 that the state established a commission on environmental education by executive order. This commission was charged with creating a plan of action, and that plan was launched in 1993. It established a formal structure to integrate environmental ed into the state’s K-12 curriculum. It created standards and it also advocated for teacher professional development. As a result of that, there was an expansion of schools participating in environmental education programming and curriculum, as well as increased professional development for training teachers. However, it wasn’t until 2020 when climate change education became mandated, that all educators were required to teach climate change in all subject matter areas between K-12, and that’s when the need for training became urgent.
Fortunately, a grant that’s referred to as the Climate Change Learning Collaborative was issued by the Department of Education. And in partnership with Ramapo State College, the School of Conservation is part of this network. We’ve trained roughly 400 educators over the last two years. There are also 14 community-based organizations like the schools offering such training. And in our first year, collectively, we’ve offered 160 events around the state. 400 public schools were represented. There are 2,400 participants and 740 unique educators participating. Now, this is just for the first year. We haven’t crunched the numbers for year two. I expect them to be similar, and fortunately, the grant has been renewed for a third year, so hundreds more educators will be trained and given tools and resources to bring to their students.
Additionally, the grant has provided for school trips and opportunities for students to experience nature firsthand while learning about how the climate is changing, what actions they can take to address it. With evaluations taken at the end of these sessions, we’re learning that the impact of this grant is far-reaching.
One participant told us that she has used multiple lessons from the School of Conservation in her classroom this year, and she plans to continue to do so. And she said, because of my involvement, I’m more mindful of the complex connections to nature that translate to home and school. So we know anecdotally and empirically, the time and nature through environmental education programs have led to improving academic performance, personal growth, including confidence and problem-solving skills. So from my perspective, the direction we as educators need to take is continued advocacy to our government leaders and decision-makers for sustainable support for pre-service training, teacher professional development, and student environmental education field trips.
Additionally, I believe we need to find new channels and new audiences beyond the education community to share the results of our research, show the benefits of environmental education to society. This will help us nurture a wider constituency of supporters that will advocate with us for investment in environmental education.
Thank you.
[00:11:37] David P: Okay. Well, thank you very much, Kerry. And now I, with great pleasure, turn the virtual floor over to Tom.
[00:11:46] Tom B: So, it’s an honor to be here with you this morning. And I’m going to start with just a very short background about me. I have a long career in education. I got involved in education through the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties and taught in Harlem, in East Harlem, for 10 years after getting my master’s from Bank Street College of Education, and in the early eighties, I got involved with an organization called. Educators for Social Responsibility Metropolitan Area, which was formed by educators concerned about the danger of nuclear war. At that time, the United States and the Soviet Union were escalating the nuclear arms race. And so for the next 36 years, I was the founding executive director of ESR Metro. We changed our name to Morningside Center for Teaching Social Responsibility in 2006. So after 36 years with Morningside Center, I retired in 2019 and set to work on my book, which is called “Teach for Climate Justice: A Vision for Transforming Education.” The book is not a curriculum; it’s a vision of what education needs to be in this time of three interwoven crises: global warming, environmental degradation, and. Inequality. And the book, the vision, has eight components, and today I’m going to address the first two.
The first component of the vision is build the beloved community in our classrooms and schools. The second part of the vision is cultivating love and understanding of nature, and I’m going to introduce you to that part of the vision: love, and cultivating love and understanding of nature. With two stories, you’re going to meet two teachers and learn of their approaches to cultivating love and understanding of nature.
The first is Megan Wilford. And Megan teaches at a small school called Keene Central School in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. Her school is a small K-12 school, about 170 students, 40% of whom qualify for free lunch. I’m just going to read you in Megan’s own words, how she thinks about her teaching. “I love exposing children to real world issues and then coaching them toward action to solve them. My students and their aha moments sustain me in this work. Whether the issues are local or global, it’s vital to foster this sense of agency in young people. That process and the ever-increasing urgency of the climate crisis are what keep me going.”
So Megan teaches fifth and sixth graders, and she joined with a third grade teacher a couple years ago to do a year long study of the Lake Champlain watershed in which the town of Keene and the school are located. So, by the way, she paired with a third grade teacher, so it was a third grade and sixth grade teacher and students sort of joining together for this year long study of the Lake Champlain watershed.
And started with the students, just sharing in multi-age groups sharing how their family has been connected to the watershed: swimming, boating, fishing, and visiting the various museums and so on around the watershed. And next step was field trips to, there’s a beaver pond, there’s a fast-moving stream, there’s a river, the Ausabel River. And the students would go and keep event maps, just noting down the plants, the animals, the things they saw and experienced, and their thoughts, their feelings, right. Then they hiked in Rattlesnake Mountain, which is a popular tourist district in the area. They visited Essex Farm nearby to learn about sustainable agriculture, and they visited the ECHO Lake Center ECHO standing for environmental culture, history, and opportunity. It describes itself as a “seriously fun science center,” and they took a course called Rock and Roll Geology to learn about the geological history of the area, and they took a trip to a historical site where they learned about the Indigenous people who lived in the area 9,000 years before Europeans arrived in the 1600s. They learned about pollution from some of the local industries around Lake Champlain and about steps being taken to address that. And they heard from guest speakers, they organized a science slam that they invited the community to come. And they learned and learned and learned. And the motto of the school is Know, Understand, and Do.
The do part had to do with dog poop. You know, the students acknowledged that dogs are best friends, right .But their poop is not great for the ecosystem, you know, for the watershed. And so they organized to set up dog poop mess stations, four places in the community. They researched it. They researched the effects of dog poop on the lake. They researched the most effective mess stations. They researched how much they cost. They approached the city council. They got people from the town involved, and together they achieved their goal.
In addition, they observed World Water Day. You know, water availability is not an issue in the Lake Champlain area, but for 2.2 billion people around the world, it is an issue. And so they took part in World Water Day and they read the book, a great young adult book called “Long Walk to Water” that tells a story of a girl in South Sudan who spends her whole day trekking to a place to get water, fill up her bucket, and return to her home so that her family can have water. Not able to go to school, she spends her whole day trekking there. And they met with people who, they learned about an organization that digs wells for families in South Sudan and raised money to contribute to that.
[00:19:29] Emmanuel: Tom, sorry, I’m going to put my hat of the timekeeper on.
[00:19:32] Tom: Yes.
[00:19:33] Emmanuel: One, one extra minute please. Thank you.
[00:19:35] Tom: One more minute.
[00:19:36] Emmanuel: One more minute, please.
[00:19:38] Tom B: The story of Megan and her year long study illustrates the framework for our chapter, which is to cultivate love and understanding of nature, you need to make it personal. You need to make it local. You need to be stewards for the environment. And you need to address climate justice. And her story illustrates exactly how to do that.
If I had more time, and maybe we’ll have time later, I’ll tell another story, takes place in New York City, Liat Olenick, who’s a science teacher for grades K-4, and how she is in a very different environment, bringing magic and environmental learning to her students. Thank you.
[00:20:26] David P: Thank you, Tom. Okay. Deb, do you want to take us home?
[00:20:32] Deb M: Okay. So I’m Deb L. Morrison. The L is actually important because there is more than one Deb Morrison on the West Coast of North America working in climate justice. So this is me. I’m really grateful to be living and working here on Salish territory, including
Cowichan, Penelakut, Pequachin, Malahat, Tsawout, Tsarlip, and Tseycum nations.
So really very grateful for that, these homeland spaces. I work with the University of Washington. And I have been honored to collaborate with so many folks across North America and across the world. So we’ll talk a little bit about that. And I’m currently a lead author on the IPCC on knowledge, mobilization, and climate literacy. So lots of responsibility there. So I live in this Salish region, which is a bioregion that crosses Canada and the US. Nature doesn’t really care about political borders as much. And so this is the place that is near and dear to me.
So, as we are thinking about this idea of caring, stewardship, and community engagement, I wanted to share with you a recent article. It’s Open Access. We’re trying really hard to make sure resources are widely available in community, and so this article really kind of lays out some of the key aspects of care. Like when we talk about care, what do we really mean, right. And so we think about lots of the things that have already been said. We think about attention to emotions, inviting curiosity about the world, right. That’s actually part of how we care about the other-than-human components of our ,. Hope, like always trying to focus on hope, thinking about adaptive capacities. We actually don’t want a false hope. We want a pragmatic type of hope of how to move through the world, relationality and how power and positionality also. We have to own what power we have and leverage it for the commons.
And then this idea of transdisciplinary and justice-oriented learning and some of the resources that have been talked about here today are really, really helpful in thinking about that. But as we think about climate learning, we have to also think about what are the systems moves, right. Not only what are the individual moves that we make with students, but how do we build educators’ capacity, administrators’ capacity, communities’ capacity to envision a different educational system.
And also, I want to think about when we’re thinking about climate justice literacy, if we name it that way, you know, there are lots of different ways to understand it, to see how it’s, bright spotted in the world like the example that Tom just gave. But one of the things we want to think about is how can we really create a transformative definition? And so, we’ve been toying with this idea. We have some resources that are all linked to these slides. And this slide link is in the chat already. Please feel free to just dive into these and look at them.
We want to meet people where they’re at. Like you can’t, to really affect change, you have to engage agency that already exists in the world. So we have to meet people with what they care about and the locations and places and context they are, and help them build and co-design learning from those spaces. So this Wheel of Climate Justice education, we think of it as the sun diagram and we think about the different ways that we can start with one tangent and pull people into climate justice in different ways. And that might be a language learning focus. It could be a race-based justice focus, it could be a frontline community, or even like a science, really hardcore science focus, right. There are ways in and through to think about diverse science knowledges to understand and expand our world. Ideally, we want to start touching on all of these rays at some level.
So, there’s lots of different ways to define climate literacy, and I’m actually working on some writing to hold all of these different versions of climate literacy together. One thing is very clear that climate literacy in the modern world does not only include science literacy, it includes literacy around emotions and emotional management and resilience. It includes understanding social movements, action, government policies, social sciences. It involves many different things.
I also would like to challenge our idea that all that knowledge has to reside in a single individual. As we’ve heard today, really, it’s about collective agency, collective action and effort. And so we can hold those knowledges together in many different people and it’s the relationships among us and with other-than-human organisms in our own context. And so it’s those relationships among these different components that are critical for everyone to learn. I would argue that many of us my age didn’t have this learning in school, so we need to also learn it as we build capacity for others.
Oh, one other thing that I just wanted to share is I do have an article that talks about these ideas conceptually, hopefully it’s easy to read. It’s meant to be for like an every person article. These ideas are called Not Working in Infrastructure. So not working is the idea that we just build tighter relationships in all different directions, in ways, and infrastructure is the idea that we resource people to do the next thing or the new thing in ways that actually really facilitate that thing getting done. And that can be through book studies. It can be through co-design of curriculum in a local place. It can be just going outside and knowing your place, right?. Like going for connected space, learning efforts together. Slow down, like everybody said, slow down and learn your place.
So there are three different examples that I’ve provided here that have resources. The Accelerating Climate Change Education in Canadian Teacher Education in Canadian Teacher Education is amazing. Dr. Ellen Field and Hillary Inwood. Really amazing effort to coordinate structural support for educators across Canada. And Clime Time is Washington State’s effort. It actually got defunded this year for the first time in eight years. But the New Jersey effort that Kerry talked about, it was a legislatively state-funded effort. And the resources are all here. All these are hyperlinked in the slide deck, so please feel free to dive in. And then the Office for Climate Education is actually the arm of the IPCC educational partner tightly with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and they’re producing. Science, rigorous resources that can be contextualized in different locations, and I’ve been partnering with them for some time.
So maybe just a couple last things. I feel like I can’t go anywhere without talking about STEM teaching tools. They’re an infrastructure resource. I have been working at the University of Washington for 10 years now and have contributed to what’s called the climate learning space. We are actually going to eventually launch something called the Climate Teacher Ed Tools. These resources are some of the ones that are on the slide. They’re really one-page, double-sided briefs that are meant as an object to learn around. So they can be used by families, by administrators, by educators. You can use them with students. There are all sorts of ways to use them, and they’re co-designed with collaborators across different contexts. So please dive in and feel free to explore those.
I really, really do agree with many of the things that have been said. Really, to grow this type of systems work, we need to slow down. We need to get outside every day, every one of us, and we need to do that in collective ways as well. So we’ve got to fight this individualistic narrative that goes on. Learning is a collective activity, and we learn in and with each other in and with the land and the waters of our regions. I really encourage folks to just make it a daily practice to get out with others in space, learn those connections of history to place.
[00:28:38] Amy H-L: We co-sponsor Educating for the World We Want, a series of Saturday salons, with three partners, Agastya International Foundation in India, the Center for Artistry and Scholarship in Argentina and the U.S., and Thinking with You in Spain and globally. Check out the website, globalconversations.net, for more information and ways you can get involved.
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