Webinar recording

Climate Action Pedagogy (CAP): Co-Working Session

Karen Costa 

Karen Costa 

Niya Bond

Niya Bond

This page contains the proceedings of the ‘Climate Action Pedagogy (CAP) Design Challenge: Live Co-Working Session ‘ hosted by Karen Costa and OneHE team.

– All right, welcome everyone. We are recording. My name is Karen Costa. I’m going to do a a little bit more of an intro later. I’m joined by my friend Niya Bond, who’s representing One Higher Ed. We are so glad that you are here with us today. I cannot tell you how grateful I am to be, this has been a long time in the making. So we are going to get started. Please take a minute here, settle in, decide what you want to do with your camera. I love seeing your faces and cameras are absolutely optional.

So we are here to do some work together today or to listen in or to reflect. We’ll talk a little bit about adapting the work today. This is Climate Action Pedagogy. We’re calling this a design challenge, and we’re calling it a co-working session. So very excited to be working with you all. Niya is going to be sharing these slides with you in the chat every once in a while. You can also, if you see somebody who’s struggling and saying, “Hey, I just came in and I need those slides.” We’re all here supporting each other so please help out with that.

So quick intro from me while Niya and I are introducing ourselves, please can you say hello in the chat and maybe do your short intro as well. Maybe where you’re Zooming in from, maybe what you do, or what you love. We would love to see that. So I am an adjunct. I also do faculty development facilitation. I’m a writer, originally from New Jersey and now live in Massachusetts. I love reading and watching sports with my family, Red Sox, ooh, it’s tough. Niya, do you want to say hello?

– Yeah, hi everyone. I’m a faculty development facilitator here at OneHE. I’m also a writer and an adjunct, and I love adopting bulldogs from the rescue that I volunteer at and being a plant and human mom. I have my own little plant business called Wicked Roots that I’ve just started.

– I did not know that. So that’s very exciting. Yes, I am in awe of Niya’s ability to do the plant, all the plant things. I do not have that. We have, as you can see, Niya and I have a lot in common, which is why we’re friends and why we’re here today. We do not have the plant thing in common. Okay so do, if you haven’t already, please do share your loves in the chat and maybe where you’re Zooming in from. So, as a reminder, we have this gorgeous live session today. We have 90 minutes budgeted. Stay for what you can no worries. But Niya and I will be here till 1:30 PM Eastern time. In addition to this, we wanted to provide multiple ways of engaging with climate action pedagogy for you all. So in addition to this live session, there is also a self-paced course in the OneHE platform. Many of you came to us via OneHE and you’re already members in that platform you can find the course there. If you are not already a member of OneHE, the course is available to members. So there is, I believe it’s $14.99 a month to join OneHE and you get all their content, or you can, and you can check it out with a free 10 day trial. So this is available to you as well. It’s going to be very similar to what we do here today, but it would also give you a bit more information and a different way to engage with the content.

So let me pop that into the chat as well. If you want to check out the self-paced course. Awesome. So just another opportunity for you to learn this content. All right, so I have mentioned a few times that we want you to adapt this session to your needs. So here is the invitation. I want you to do what works for you today. So we’re calling it a design challenge and a co-working session. If you are just like not into work, just finished grading, I want to sit back and relax and just listen. That is amazing and it’s part that is part of the work, right? So please do whatever you need to do to adapt this experience to you today. Cameras on or off, whatever you need to do you can all obviously switch between the two. You can come into this saying, I want to design a learning artifact for my course by the time I’m done this 90 minutes, which is amazing. Or you can say, I’m going to more quietly listen and reflect, amazing as well.

Some of you are like, complete novices in terms of this climate action work, and that’s an amazing place to be. I definitely feel like a novice in that regard as well. Some of you have more expertise around climate change and climate action. You are all welcome here today let’s learn from each other and share resources, and of course, most importantly, show up as your whole human self. I have a couple links in the speaker’s notes. Niya would you, oh, you just did good. I have a couple links for you in the speaker’s notes for this slide. One is to a poem called “The Invitation” that some of you may have heard about and might enjoy. The other is a writer I’ve been following lately named Esme Wang, who is writing about being a writer with chronic illness. And how do I show up to write when I’m not feeling well and when I’m dealing with chronic health issues. That blog post has been life changing for me to think about how I can, what I can do, what I can’t do, and the importance of balancing rest and a sense of purpose and contribution. So I show up here today feeling very, very human more than ever before. Lots of chronic health issues going on, and I’m here to contribute what I can today. So if that resonates with you, you definitely want to check that out.

All right, here is our agenda for today. And if you’re coming in and haven’t already said hello in the chat, please do so and please feel free to use the chat. Comments, ask questions. Niya is here, I’ve got a backup in the chat. That chat is there for you. So our plan is we’re going to do a quick check in via the chat. I’m going to introduce you to a design template that you can use throughout the day and in the future to do this work. Share a little bit about our vision for how you might design your climate action pedagogy work and some recommended resources. We’re then going to move into our first co-working session. So our plan is 15 minutes where we will just sort of be asynchronously or synchronously/asynchronously working together, co-working together for 15 minutes. You will be amazed if you actually sit down and work for 15 minutes. As someone who lives with ADHD I can tell you, you can get so much done in 15 minutes and working together can be really helpful for that. We’ll check in after that co-work session. I’m going to give you a few additional resources and then we’ll do a second 15 minute co-working session. Breakout rooms will be available but not required at all. They will be completely optional. I know some of you love them and some of you don’t love them. Niya and I will be staying in the main room and you are invited to stay with us. So like zero, zero breakout room pressure and we love you if you want to be in a breakout room and then we’ll wrap up. Any questions about the agenda or any concerns about that, please post them in the chat. Hi Simon, and remember, we’re recording this, so if you need to hop out for any reason, you’ll be able to access that.

Okay, so let’s check in. Where are you? I always think I used to go to the mall a lot. There was a time when that was a big part of social life and there was one of those signs with directories when you walked in and it had the little, you are here. And sometimes I still think about that. So I like to say I am here. Where am I? I’d like to note where I am. Where am I starting? So I want to invite you all, everything’s an invitation to please share in the chat, where are you now, in your climate action pedagogy journey? This can be a word, a phrase, an emoji, something more thought out. Where are you now in your climate action pedagogy journey? I’m going to take a sip of water while you all reflect. So Cheryl has shared beginning in all caps. I don’t know if that was intentional or not. Like beginning. I see Maha’s sharing, I care, but I know I have not done much, wonderful. Lapsed, not far enough here we go. Now, I love when it moves so fast I can’t keep up with it. You all know that is my version of heaven, okay? Researching, starting from scratch. Novice, I see the need. Not much action. Novice again, novice again, gorgeous. I love this. We can only start from where we are, right? That’s the only place we can start. I will share that I felt extremely hopeless about all of this. We’ll just say all of this. Oh, thank you, somebody reminded us to turn on closed captioning. That was, thank you.

I felt very hopeless about this about 18 months ago and felt like I was supposed to be doing all of these things, but I didn’t know how to do them to address climate change. And long story short, it came to me, why don’t I start where I am already working? Why don’t I start where I already am? I work in higher education, in faculty development. I think I’m doing good work there. What if I started there? What if I brought climate action to where I already am? As well as in my family life where I also have space to make changes. And I started focusing on that. And this is what, where we are today, all of us here. Imagine if there’s 48 of us in the room now, a hundred have signed up to get the recording. Imagine, I know you all work with hundreds of students. Imagine the ripples this is going to create, okay? Just from starting where we are.

So I just, that’s a big invitation for you is to really embrace that. There’s no wrong place to be, Cheryl, you’re a step ahead of me. Of course, of course ’cause we’re going to get there. Okay so I’m going to share with you all a template. This is an optional template, okay? You do not have to use this, but it’s kind of got everything nice and organised for you. And I love a template I love checklists, I love, organisational support. If you do not have a Google account, you’re not going to be able to open that, okay? So give me a minute here. That link I just shared is going to force a copy of this template. So it’s going to say, would you like to make a copy? You’re going to say yes, that now is your copy. You can start writing and working in that template, okay? Somebody gimme a thumbs up that they can access, that they were able to open up that copy or a yes gorgeous, okay.

– [Audience Member] You’re able to open it, but it doesn’t copy automatically you still have to copy it manually.

– Yes you have to click a copy, okay. If you, that’s okay if you, so here’s another option coming at you. Liz, hopefully this works for you. This will open the doc in a view only option, okay? So you’ve got a Bitly link that will force a copy that you can then start typing in. And then the second link is a backup option, gorgeous. Okay so I have, if I move all of your amazing faces, I want to pop over to that template, okay. Y’all can see the template on the screen now? Yes. Okay, so this is broken down into steps. We’re going to go through these steps right now. I’m going to go back to the slides in a moment, but I just want to scroll you through the template. You might want to work during your work periods of this session. You might want to work in this template because it takes you through things step by step. For example, one of the activities is to use learning experience design to design with empathy. So you can work one of your work activities in those breaks. Could be to answer the questions in this chart. All of the recommended climate action resources are in this template, okay? With hyperlinks to all of them.

And then last but not least, if you are, some of you I know are designers, instructional designers, learning experience designers. Some of you are faculty who feel really strong in your design. If you’re feeling a little bit like a novice in terms of how to approach a design challenge, step six gives you a really, like design 101 template that you can use, okay? And then there’s some next steps there. So save that to your bookmark that y’all, okay? I know if your bookmarks look like mine, that might not be the like safest place, but you’ll find it and that’s going to be a really good resource for you to use, awesome. And you don’t have to use that, that’s optional. Okay that’s completely optional.

Another thing that before we get started that I want to share is that we all want to be keeping accessibility in mind. Let’s start with accessibility. We don’t want to create climate action content and pedagogy that’s not accessible to all of our learners, right? We don’t want to do that. So I’ve given you a link in this slide to some additional accessibility resources, okay? We’re going to focus on the climate action piece today. There’s lots of amazing accessibility resources and folks you can follow and I’m sure your institutions have folks, okay so I’m not going to go too in depth into that. But a short request is if you’re thinking about videos, wanting to add captions to those videos, if you’re including images, things like adding alt text. If you’re tweeting about this session and want to share a screenshot, please add alt text to that and your other tweets so that everyone can view this important content and engage, making sure we provide diverse representation and offering choices. So even that little thing I just did with the Google Doc, right? So trying to give folks choices. Risa, my dear, is causing trouble in the chat. Niya would you make sure. I am teasing and I know that Risa loves when I tease, okay.

So let’s move on. We are going to make sure everything is accessible to our learners. Who was it that mentioned emergent strategy? You were a step ahead of me. So as you’re thinking through what you’re going to create for your learners today. I want to share with you, some of you are new to emergent strategy and you’re saying, what’s this? Some of you have heard me speak on this or have learned about it in other spaces. Emergent strategy, here’s one of my favorite definitions from Sage Krump. Sage Krump writes, “Emergent strategy is amplifying the importance of the incremental, to impact the monumental.” Okay, so we really celebrate that little by little. We embrace it. We say, oh, I’m a novice and I’m going to do something really small today. We want that. We’re not saying like, oh, that’s bad and I want to make an excuse for it, that’s the point.

Another way to put that from Adrian Marie Brown. Small is good. Small is all the large, is a reflection of the small. Somewhere in my pile next to me, I have Adrian’s books. There’s a link to it in the speaker’s notes. That quote is from “Holding Change”. There’s also an entire book called “Emergent Strategy”. So if you hear or have an energy around you today, this isn’t good enough, it’s not enough. This issue is too big. What’s the point of this? This is the slide to come back to. Small, no, no, no, no, no, no. That’s me, that’s the voice telling me to get overwhelmed and that what’s the point? And then I’m not going to do anything, right? So we come back to “Small is good, small is all.” that is one of my mantras, so it’s really important.

And please continue to share in the chat, I love this. Liz is saying, that’s how my 85 year old mama takes care of her yard. Weeding one area, one hour a day. The power of slow accumulation. Yes, thank you. So please feel free in the chat to react or share things that resonate with you as part of your learning experience. Okay so another thing to keep in mind as you’re doing this work is the model of learning experience design, or LXD. Some folks are familiar with this, some aren’t. We welcome you all here today. Some of you may lean more toward instructional design. This is one of the foundations of my work in higher education. What I love about LXD is that for me, my understanding of it is that it’s grounded on empathy. So you start with who are my learners and what do they need? And what is the context in which we are all learning, right? The the thing I’ve kind of added here for faculty that I work with is, yeah, that’s important, and who are you? Who are you as faculty? I know Sarah’s here today, Sarah Rose Kavanaugh, who’s written about one of the best things we can do, it was in “The Chronicle”. Feel free to share it Sarah. One of the best things we can do as faculty is to take care of ourselves, right? So let’s make sure we’re asking this question as we’re designing our artifacts. Who am I and what do I want and need? And what is the context in which I am teaching and learning, right? Let’s we have to have empathy for ourselves. Thank you, Sarah. If we’re going to do that for our students.

So you might think of some genius design today that’s going to take, 700 hours of your time. So the invitation through LXD is, just scale that back a bit, right? That might be lovely for my students, but it’s not going to work for me and therefore it won’t work for my students, okay? If you’d like a little bit more of that, if you’re like, ooh, this sounds really interesting, I’m into this empathy thing, here is an empathy map. You might want to use this during your work time, okay? I’ve given you, in the template that I shared with you, there’s like a little mini empathy exercise. But if you want to go into more detail together, there’s an empathy map. I know some of you have worked with empathy maps before. Any questions about LXD or anything else, feel free to pop them in the chat. And I see folks sharing resources. Risa has shared another one of Adrian Marie Brown’s books that is absolutely on my summer reading list. I have it, it’s just getting to it. “Pleasure Activism”, so I’m excited for that.

Okay, so let’s talk about some of the climate action resources that you might choose to work with in your work. We’ve got two as a reminder, in case you came in late, we have two 15 minute co-working sessions set up for you. And those are for you to design for yourself. But one of, some of you might want to dig into these recommended resources, okay? So the first one that I’m going to share, is Regeneration. So Regeneration is a climate action organisation. Their goal is to end the climate crisis in one generation. There is a book if you’re into that. But they also have this amazing website. I’m going to show you why I love their website so much for faculty in a moment. This is the Nexus page of their website. Niya, oh, actually I’ll do it, just copy and paste here if you want to poke around there’s the website.

So they have listed, as you can see here, different climate issues, okay. So we’ve got buildings, we’ve got beavers, we’ve got the clothing industry, on and on. Let’s click on one of these. Each of these is organised in a very similar way. We love, you know me, I love a template. So it’s broken down into action items, governance, bad actors, key players and then learn. Okay so let’s scroll down here. This is a lot of folks have heard about fast fashion and the amount of waste generated by the fashion industry and how we can be more mindful of, yeah, I could go, that could be an entire webinar, right? But I just want to show you how gorgeously this is organised for faculty and for students. So if you scroll down here, you’ve got learn. So here’s watch, these are videos. Here’s read, these are short readings. Here’s listen, these are podcasts and then here are some key questions you can ask. So from a design perspective, I love how clean and organised this is.

Let me go back here and let’s look at, let’s look at electrify everything. That’s one I’ve been learning about. It’s organised the same way, folks, right? So you’ve got a similar structure that you can work with. So I love this for faculty and students. You can assign students a specific one of the Nexus issues if it’s most relatable to your course, or you can make it more open and allow students to engage with this content, perhaps the issue that is most interesting to them, okay? Any questions about Nexus? Pop them in the chat. The next, I’m going to share three with you. So that was Regeneration Nexus.

The next one I’m going to share is “All We Can Save”. All we can save also has a partner book. Okay, I’m going to pop that in. Oh, Niya is ahead of me. So this is a, an amazing organisation that is doing a lot of good work. This is their for educators page, okay? You do not need to read the book to get value here. There are ideas for assignments, there are discussion guides, there are essay summaries, there are TED talks. So this is a great resource for us, “All We Can Save”. If you are thinking about bringing a book into your class, this would be a good option. The ‘All We Can Save’ book there are, it’s an essay collection. So I love that because you can, you could assign one essay for example.

All right, the third option is Climate Action Venn Diagrams, the work of Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, Niya is ahead of me, thank you. I love this, this is a great resource. Dr. Johnson has a TED talk that you can see right here that introduces it, it’s 10 minutes, gorgeous 10 minute, we don’t want to go on for too long. And you could work with Venn diagrams in your course. Okay, so those are three sort of starter resources for you all. We’re going to be transitioning into our first co-work session right now.

Those are, I have chosen those because I felt like they were accessible to faculty who are novices in climate action. And that it wouldn’t take a lot of digging to find something that would work for you and your students, right? There’s a ton of climate action information out there. Some of it isn’t ideal for, immediate and easy translation into a classroom activity. So I really wanted to focus on faculty time and make this as seamless as possible. You don’t have to use these resources. There are other resources. I’m going to, in phase two, I’m going to introduce some more to you. And some of you have, Risa’s sharing a specific resource here. Gorgeous, if you have other resources you want to share. But again, this is sort of like the path of least resistance resources that will, that are designed in a way that I think will work with all of you.

Just another note here, remember small is all. So we can really go down a rabbit hole with the amount of content that’s out there around climate action, which is a good thing that we have that information. We have to work, something I have learned, let me say, I have to work to protect myself against overwhelm, okay? So I really have to be like, I could, there’s a lot of bookmarks and a lot of books and a lot of videos. So I really having just these top three as sort of my back pocket resources helps me to protect myself against overwhelm. Okay and keep please, if you have resources that you think would be more relevant or relatable for certain audiences or work for you, please share them in the chat.

Okay we are getting ready and we are actually in a good place time-wise, so that’s always exciting. We are getting ready to transition to 15 minutes of time to co-work. So here’s how this is going to go. And if you have questions, please feel free to write them in the chat. We are asking you to dedicate the next 15 minutes to, and I’m going to set a timer on my phone to working, on a climate action assignment artifact. This could be a course announcement, this could be a video, this could be an assessment, it could be a mini lecture. Anything that brings climate action into your classroom. That’s the goal for the next 15 minutes. Some of you might use that time to do design work. Some of you might want to use that time to look through those resources I just shared or to play around with the template. There’s no one size fits all here, okay?

I am going to create breakout rooms and I’m going to create 10 breakout. Actually, we’re at 50. I’m going to create five breakout rooms, okay? If you want to, if you have a friend here and you want to say in the chat, or if you want to private message them, ‘Hey Niya meet me in, let’s meet in breakout room five’. Please feel free to do so if you want to go in the breakout room and your time is well spent using that space to work with others. However, I do want to encourage you all to really just to work for 15 minutes and focus on this for 15 minutes. I know I’m somebody who can kind of let myself get pulled into conversations as a way to avoid doing the design work that I need to do. So let’s focus on doing the work. And if you want to use that time to chat in breakout rooms or work with others, please feel free, completely optional. Any questions about that, please pop them in the chat. Risa is on that vibe, I like that.

Niya and I are going to remain in the main room. If you have questions during that 15 minutes, we’re going to be muted, okay? But we will keep our eyes on the chat to respond to anybody that has questions that come up. So if you get stuck or you need a little boost or have a question, we will be engaging in the chat. I’m going to invite you, I’m going to, so I’m going to get those breakout rooms going. There they are. I lied I’m actually going to make 10 just in case. Okay so these are going to be, breakout rooms are open and you don’t have to go into a breakout room. If you don’t want to go into a breakout room, just stay. Lynn, we’re not doing specific topics for the breakout rooms, just for simplicity’s sake. If you have something you want to work on and you want to share it in the main chat and see if somebody wants to meet you in a breakout room, have at it, okay?

And remember, this is the first time we’re doing this, y’all. We’re going to, we’re thinking we’re going to do it again in August, but y’all are our test cases. So if there’s something you want tell us, then we’ll do it next time. Rachel is asking if anybody wants to meet and chat on generative AI, ChatGPT. Okay, so breakout rooms are open. I’m going to start our 15 minute timer. Oh, and I’m also going to put on a little music. Niya, can you hear my music, okay?

– Yes.

– All right folks. So I’m going to encourage you to mute to maybe take your buds out and we’ll meet back in 15 minutes about 12:45. Any questions, pop them in the chat, but let’s work, okay.

All right folks, we should all now be back in the same space. And let’s check in. So where are you now on this little, on the the little map? How did it go? So I want to invite everybody into the chat. Where are you now? A word, a phrase, an emoji. A resource you found. A barrier you got stuck, you need help, you realise something, you have to offer others, whatever the case may be, please feel free. Somebody might want to say the, sitting and focusing and working for 15 minutes felt didn’t work for me, was really uncomfortable. I’ll raise my hand for that. And then I say to myself, I, yeah, I can do that.

So let me check in here. Heather has shared pondering a tie in with social justice and systemic racism. Absolutely we’re going to talk a little bit more about that. There are some additional resources. I mentioned the full course in OneHE on disability justice and climate justice. That, so even just using, searching with those terms and activities can be very fruitful. I also want to kind of scroll back here, if you want to just take a peek back in the chat. Lynn asked a great question about climate action and mental health. So I shared a couple resources in the chat about that. Some of you might be, might find that valuable. Cybil has created a draft of an assignment to use this summer. Liz got an idea for a project from the Nexus site and involves learning from other countries, communities that are doing this already. Wonderful. I have an, oh, Lisa, I’m so thrilled with that.

There’s, I don’t know if you all experienced this in your teaching, right? I’m going to pull back the curtain a little bit. Setting aside 15 minutes for me to shut up is excruciating for me. I want to be in here doing and talking. And that was really hard for me. And I also know that we, that’s how people need space to learn and create. So if you, that might resonate for you. Maybe think about giving your students that same time in your classes. Lots of wonderful things being shared here in the chat. So if you haven’t already and you’d like to share, I’m here to learn. So y’all are sharing resources in the chat. I’ve given you three to keep it simple, but I’m seeing others generate. That’s what we want, right? We want this to be generative, to be creative, to be coming up with things that didn’t exist before, I love this. Lisa your kind words are so appreciated.

Okay, we’re going to have one more co-working session, but before we do, I want to share some additional resources with you all. So I shared three resources that were kind of general with you and now I’m going to get a little bit more specific about learning activities. Those first three were kind of big picture. These six, are more specific. So the, and I want to share the reason I did that, because this might resonate with some of you as you teach this work with your students. We have evidence that providing examples to learners can limit creativity. So some of you know, I’m writing a book right now about ADHD and creativity is a big piece of it. And there’s some really interesting research that when we give examples to folks, whether they have ADHD or not, it actually limits their creativity because they’re constrained by those examples. And I need examples folks, right? I need to see what other people are doing sometimes I need that concrete aspect. So what I’ve done here is I sent you off all to work for 15 minutes without these specific examples because I didn’t want to limit your creativity, okay? Now I’m going to share them in the hopes that you got some cool brainstorming done. If you feel like, no, I don’t want to get too in depth into these, I am on a creative flow. I’m not going to even think about these too much. Go with that, trust that. And if you’re like, no, I think I do need some more specific examples, then follow that as well, okay? Any questions or concerns about that, feel free to share in the chat.

Okay so the first one, by the way, all of the links that I’m going to share with you are in the speaker’s notes for the slides and they’re in the template. Niya, can you do me a favor and share the slides and then also share that design template with folks. So keep an eye if you need that. There’s the slides and the links are on slide 16. And Niya’s also going to share the design template and the links are there as well. So I’m just going to kind of pop you through each of these. So the first one is called a punch list. So this is also through Regeneration. This is a specific activity that you could use with your learners. A punch list is basically like, here are some specific actions I can take in a certain span of time around climate action. So you could create these as a class community, right? You could do these in any community you’re a part of. If you’re a group of faculty or staff, you could do these as well, okay? So the idea is that you would work with your students. One per one small climate action assignment is to work with your students to create a punch list. This can be very general, but certainly depending on what you teach psychology, history, nursing, you could ask students to bring course content and specific aspects of your discipline into their punch list. That could be one of part of your design, okay? So the Regeneration website, if you register for an account, you can make a punch list on their site and actually share it, but you certainly don’t need to make an account and students could make a punch list in Google Docs, okay? Any questions about punch lists, pop those in the chat, okay.

The next specific example I’m going to share with you is a carbon calculator. Some of you may have done this, already. So this is also on the Regeneration website. And basically you plug in what you do, how you live, the types of fuel that you, and travel and how you keep your house warm or cool and all those things. And it will discuss your carbon impact, okay? So this can be a pretty short activity that students can do. And then you could discuss this as a class. You could again weave in your, we are discipline agnostic here at climate action pedagogy with the confidence that you all can weave your specific course content into these more general activities, okay. So carbon calculator is a great way to start the conversation about fossil fuels and simple activity that you can use with your students. And again, to whatever extent you want, weave in your actual courses. Lovely, yeah. If any we’re going to keep going if folks need to pop out, lovely. And you, the recording will be accessible as well.

Okay, third specific assignment option, public service announcements. So I have given you a link to, this is from Massachusetts, it’s a Google drive and these are actual students public service announcements that they have agreed to make public through an initiative in Massachusetts called Cooler Communities. It’s, these are K through 12 students. I intentionally shared this because, these are K through 12 students, so most of us are probably higher Ed. You’re going to see some really gorgeous examples of what these students did. So certainly our students PSAs, creating public service announcements, little videos that talk about climate action is a very doable assignment for our learners. Any questions about any of these pop them in the chat.

Another great resource I have for you is to reflect on whose land we are on, okay? And there is, this is through the website. And depending, I know we’ve got a global audience here, depending on where you are in the world, this will have varying degrees of relevance to you. So this is a Canadian website Native Land, and this is their teacher’s guide that I’ve linked you to. So one activity you could do with your learners is to invite students to reflect on, whose land they’re on. And then there are all of these gorgeous additional specific activities in this, with this idea of land as pedagogy in this resource. Okay so if that’s something that’s interesting to you in the course, I go into a lot more detail about weaving in and centering tribal and indigenous wisdom around climate action and this is one example of how you can do that. And when I say in the course, the OneHE self-paced course.

Okay, a fifth option, is, using the Nexus guide. So I’m going to bring us back to this amazing Nexus website. To do your, most of us who teach do some sort of introductory discussion, right? Whether that’s online, Zoom, asynchronous, synchronous, onsite, we do some sort of discussion. So one idea that I’ve had that you could weave in climate action in a really small way, is to send students to the Nexus site and ask them to select a climate issue that is most interesting to them and introduce themselves to the class, using, ‘Hi, I am Karen, I’m from Massachusetts, and the climate action topic that I am most interested in, is the clothing industry’. And students can share why that interested them. So you get students on the website, you get them poking around real simple and can be woven into any class. So creating a discussion introduction with Nexus.

And then the six options, sort of that specific energy I have for you again, is to create a climate action zine. So this website is the work of Dawn Stahura. Some of you know Dawn. Dawn led a zine workshop for us last year at the start of pride month through OLT faculty development. And some of you might have been in that workshop, it was amazing. And a zine is basically just like, kind of an edgy, fun, creative way to put our ideas out into the world. So Dawn has this amazing website. It’s got templates, it’s got introductions for zines, what they are, mini zines, tons of resources here. So this could be sort of a summative project for a course, right? That students would create a zine for your course. So let’s say that you teach what is next to me, social psychology. This zine could be a way to weave in the course concepts in a really fun and creative way along with climate action, okay.

So I want to pause there, I’m going to check in on the chat. We’re going to shift into another 15 minute co-work session and then we’ll wrap up and have a gorgeous amount of time for questions, ideas, where people need help, where people can offer help. So I see a couple notes on those specific assignments Lars shared, I’ve used this calculator before to have students figure out impacts of changes they plan to make. So you could, here’s what I’m doing now, carbon calculator, here’s what I plan to do, and here’s what the impact would be. So that’s really interesting. Allison shared some assignments from a fellowship. Yes so some of you, this is in the template. You might want to create whatever you create today or in the future for climate action pedagogy, you might want to make it open and share it as OER or an open educational resource. And there’s resources in the template and the slides for you to do so. Okay any other questions we’re going to do, we’re going to challenge ourselves to stick with this for another 15 minutes and to get really some good progress made, whatever our goals are, adapting to our goals. Any other questions before we do that?

I will open up the breakout rooms again. So those breakout rooms are open. If you want to pop back into a breakout room, same or different. And you can, if you need to find a friend, the chat, the main chat is still open. I’m going to start playing. Instrumental pop again. Any other questions? All right, let’s meet back here at 1:15 folks. I’m going to be muted, Niya and I will be in the chat. Feel free to turn everything off and just work, but if any questions come up, pop them in the chat.

Just as a final wrap, this is our last slide. So I want to invite folks to come back into the chat and tell me how are you, where are you? What did you do? What didn’t you do? What’s your next step? What do you need help with? What can you offer? Whatever comes up for you. A word, an emoji, A simple emoji is welcome to answer those questions. But some of you might have want to share more. Where are you now as we wrap up? I’m going to take a sip of water. So Liz says, my next step is to talk to our campus sustainability coordinator. So we have some jealousy arising, I’m sure that you have a campus sustainability coordinator, so that’s very cool. And you have a course project idea. We love an idea and a fingers crossed emoji. So some of you might, that’s amazing. And some of you might say, I want to add, I’m going to set a goal to advocate for our campus sustainability coordinator after seeing that. Lisa spent the last 15 minutes exploring resources, feeling grateful for everyone doing this work.

Yeah, so part of, a big part of this is that someone asked about mental health and climate action. Trying to do this on our own is really tough because it’s massive, right? So some of you might, I’m not going to remember the gentleman’s name ’cause I just learned about it, but the, it’s the it’s a philosopher, I think his first name is Tim and he writes about something called “Hyperobjects”. Hyper objects are things that are so big that our brains can’t even comprehend them. And climate change is one of an example, one of his examples of hyper objects. And it can lead us to not act when we really need to act, right? So anything we can do to make things feel small and attainable and to feel that impact and doing it in community really helps.

Heather is collaborating with colleagues in Iowa on a project. Speaking of collaboration, I want to share. So this is meant, really meant to be like a 101 level climate action pedagogy endeavor. It and we want to get kind of give you a taste and get you started. We really wanted to meet folks as novices. If you want to take a next step. Some Twitter friends of mine at Western University have a course called Connecting for Climate Change Action. And that course is open in the fall to the world. And I’m going to be going through it. So if you want to join me, they do have a summer session that just started, but I’m going to be doing it in the fall. The link I shared is a great next step. If you’re like, I don’t know what my next step is, make that your next step, join me. Carl oh, my friend Carl’s here. Carl Timothy Morton Rice is the philosopher who writes on “Hyperobjects”, if you want to read more about that. They have an a book on hyper, entirely devoted to that.

Someone is sharing, develop. I’m seeing lots coming through here, wonderful. Thinking about AI ethics and climate impacts, wonderful. How to use AI in supporting SGGS, wonderful. I have to run, but this is super helpful, wonderful. Developing an entire course for climate awareness, amazing. Here’s a resource, the Climoscope Project and Carl shared Morton’s book. So this is all amazing, more than I could have hoped for. We are, I’m going to stop sharing my screen. Here we are oh, it’s Hollywood Squares amazing. Does anyone need anything? We’re a little ahead of time, which is a miracle. And I don’t need to keep folks till 1:30, but does anyone need anything? Does anyone need to share something? Does anyone need to ask for help? Does anyone have help they can offer as we sort of wrap up today, does anyone have any questions? Niya would you put your website in the chat if you don’t mind. I think that’s the best way for folks to reach you and follow your work, gorgeous. My website’s 100faculty.com, Niya’s is niyamirandabond.com. If you want to stay in touch, if you have any feedback or ideas on the session, we plan to run it again in August for we, again, we had a hundred folks sign up for this, so I think there’s an interest and folks might in August be thinking about fall courses. So we want to make it available. And as a reminder, we’ve also got that self-paced course in OneHE. Thank you, Niya. That’s the course, right Niya?

– Yeah.

– Amazing. So the first link, Niya shared, if you want to go into the course and kind of go through this a little more slowly, that would be gorgeous. Niya’s also given you the slides. Y’all feel you share the slides, share the template, I like folks knowing that I created it and put it out into that world. And if you, if there’s people that can benefit from it, have at it. I am available and interested in, if you want folks, someone to come to your institution and work with your faculty on this as a group specifically. That information’s on my website.

Yes, amazing. Niya says, we’ve also got a course coming up with Dawn Sahara, I love Dawn so much. Dawn is the one who does that zine work so that’s a great next step. Syllabus and climate awareness. Yes give me more, I would love to, do you want to come up? If folks want to come off mute and ask a question, I just need a little bit more about the syllabus and what you need help with there. Or you can type it in the chat. Someone says, I have OER for Introduction to Sustainability that will go live through the summer if anyone is interested. OER is an open educational resource.

So if you need help with bringing this into your class, yeah so the best way to reach me is my website here. 100faculty.com. It has a, I have, there’s go to 100 faculty and go to contact and that’ll work for you. Any other questions or needs or shares? I love the combination. One of the things we learn in emergent strategy is to identify what we need and what we can offer. And that’s a really powerful framework because we’re all cycling, we’re cycling through. I have needs right now. I have nothing to offer and I have a lot of needs. And then we get through that and we have things we can, we have bandwidth and we can offer support to others. And learning how to cycle through that in community feels really important.

I also experienced a paradigm shift where to center the course, yay. Paradigm shifts we celebrate those. And if you didn’t have one of those today and you just kind of like sat here, listened a little bit, looked at your phone, I promise you things got in there and that’s amazing too, okay We’re all starting where we are. We love it all. We love it all.

In this webinar hosted by Karen Costa and the OneHE team, Karen introduced the curated climate action resources that are ideally suited to easy adaptation in higher education and provided an opportunity for the participants to brainstorm with their peers, discuss the opportunities and challenges of climate action pedagogy, and ask questions.

Karen Costa is an author, adjunct faculty, and faculty development professional working to support both faculty and student success in higher education. She specialises in online pedagogy, trauma aware teaching, and supporting neurodivergent learners. 

The webinar slides are available at https://bit.ly/CAPwork (Google slides, opens in a new tab). Useful links mentioned during the webinar can be found in the speaker’s notes on the slides. During the recording, Karen refers to a Climate Action Pedagogy Design Template, which is available at https://bit.ly/CAPtemplate23 (Google doc, opens in a new tab).

If you are interested in learning more about Climate Action Pedagogy, you can take the self-paced course on Climate Action Pedagogy (CAP) Design Challenge developed by Karen.