– Welcome, everyone. Oh, there’s our recording in progress. Welcome to you who are here live. Welcome to the folks who are watching this in the future in the recording. My name is Karen Costa. I’m zooming in from Central Massachusetts. I’m joined by Dasha from OneHE and my friend and co-conspirator, Sarah Rose Cavanagh. Sarah’s gonna inter… We’re gonna introduce ourselves in a bit more detail in a minute. I see lots of familiar names and some new friends joining us. The chat is open. We are in Zoom webinar, but the chat is open. I’m gonna share the slides a couple more times, but if we have people… We have 160 people registered today, so if we have folks who are coming in and they look a little lost, let’s take care of each other. And if you all could help them out, if they’re looking for the slides and I’m not seeing it, please do so. So a quick welcome slide. Cameras are encouraged and optional. We’re in Zoom webinar sadly, so you get to see both Sarah and I today. But the place where you all get to share and learn out loud together is the Zoom chat. So please, you all know that I like to yap in the chat, so I will expect nothing less from all of you. Use that as a space to learn and engage. Sarah and I welcome it.

We are here today to talk about climate anxiety. This is a Climate Action Pedagogy workshop and we’re gonna be talking about ‘Working with climate anxiety in the college classroom: Theirs and Ours. As a reminder, the motto of Climate Action Pedagogy is ‘All courses are climate courses.’ A quick reminder for folks just coming in, you don’t need to open the slide deck, but I do recommend that you bookmark it because the slide deck speaker’s notes are filled with bonus resources. And all the research that I’m gonna cite today, it’s linked in the speaker’s notes, so that’s where you’ll find it. So you don’t need to open the slides. Again, we’re gonna be sharing them with you, but you might wanna bookmark that for future use. Okay, how to engage today. We are in Zoom webinar, but we can still have a lot of fun here today. So I encourage you to think about what you’d like to do to engage with Sarah and I as we talk about this topic. You know things that we don’t know, so we are here to learn with you and from you and to share our experiences with you. So we know that the chat will be a very rich learning experience for all of us.

There’s lots of ways you can engage, perhaps even outside of this session. Self-reflection, doodling, tweeting. Please don’t tweet, but posting and do what you got to do. We’re gonna have time at the end also for Q&A. If you haven’t already, please come into the chat and say hello and maybe where you’re joining us from. I’ve heard that at some of AOC’s recent rallies, one of the things that she is doing is saying to everybody, “Turn to the person next to you and introduce yourself.” And that one of her goals and challenges to people is to leave those rallies knowing one more person than they did when they got there. So if you see somebody in the chat who you can connect with, I really wanna encourage you to get their name, get their contact info, and continue this conversation. So, lots of ways to engage and we are here to learn with all of you.

As I mentioned, I’m Karen Costa and I will once more share the slides in the chat. My background is in education. We’re gonna be talking about climate anxiety today. I am not a clinician. I am not a psychologist. I come to you with a background in education and I also have lots of certifications in trauma and trauma work in organizations and institutions, but not a clinician, and I wanna be really clear about that. I’m also neurodivergent. I’ve got a book coming out, my first book, “99 Tips” is about making videos. You can see that there and it’s linked in the speaker’s notes. And my second book is coming soon from Johns Hopkins University Press. It’s about ADHD in the college classroom. I’m also not… I’m telling you all the things that I’m not, I’m not a climate scientist and I’m here taking action within my wheelhouse to take climate action. So just as all courses are climate courses, all jobs are climate jobs. So I invite you to think about what would it look like to identify your job as a climate job. And I’m modeling that for all of you today. Sarah, I’m gonna let you introduce yourself, but I want to welcome you here formally.

So, folks, a little story about how Sarah and I met. I don’t know if she remembers this, but probably 10 years ago, I used to write for Women in Higher Ed and I got this really cool job, right? Which was to do profiles of women in higher ed, so I could pick any women who I admired in higher ed and I got to talk to them about their work and their lives. Sarah, I’m pretty sure was the second woman that I interviewed. And Sarah, you came in second to Tressie McMillan Cottom. Okay, so she was the first one. I was obsessed and continued to be with her and Roxane Gay and the public scholarship that they were doing. But you were number two. So Tressie’s not… It’s not bad to come in second place to Tressie. And since then, I have not stopped bothering Sarah and very happy to call her a friend and colleague now as we both continue this work of supporting students and faculty in higher ed. So I’m really excited. I don’t think we’ve ever presented together before. We’ve been at each other’s sessions, but I don’t think we’ve ever facilitated before. So thrilled to be with you, my friend. And would you say hello to the group?

– Absolutely, and thank you so much, Karen and Dasha and One Higher Ed, for welcoming me into this space and to everyone in the chat. So many friends, new friends, it’s very exciting. And we’re here to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is emotions. And so I’m currently at Simmons University working in educational development and teaching a little bit in the fall still. And my background is in psychology, but I am also not a clinician. I’m an experimental psychologist. And my longer term trajectory was I initially focused on trauma and risk for mood and anxiety disorders, but then moved more and more into emotion regulation more generally, and now into teaching and learning. And in my spare time, I like to grow things and cook things and read a lot of books.

– Yes, Sarah and I are both big readers, though we have different-

– You’re bigger than me though. You’re good reads.

– I don’t know.

– [Sarah] I can’t keep up.

– I don’t know. It’s been slowing down lately. We have some… We agree on a lot of books, but some of them, I forget. There was one recently that… Oh, I’m not gonna say it but we’ll talk about it later.

– [Sarah] Oh no.

– And Hannah in the chat says, “‘Spark of Learning’ is one of my favorites.” Yes, that was the book that I was fangirling over and I was like, I need to talk to who wrote this book. And it was Sarah and that was part of our interview. So I’m not alone in that. Okay, so nothing fancy today, no breakout rooms. This is the plan, the agenda for today. And I think we’ll follow this. I think we’re gonna be good and behave and stay on track. So we’re gonna do a check-in activity. I’m gonna be modeling an activity with you all that you can do with your learners. I’m gonna overview CAP really quickly. This is not… I know many of you have attended CAP workshops, but we really wanna get to the climate anxiety content. So I’m gonna start with giving you the… Sort of the broad overview of the current thinking and research on climate anxiety, what we know, what we need to know. And then Sarah and I have set up the second half of the talk as a Q&A.

So I’ve sort of gathered together the most frequently asked questions and burning questions that I have for Sarah about this topic of climate anxiety in the classroom, theirs and ours, and she’s gonna provide some answers to our questions. We’ll take a minute or five at the end of the hour to check in and see how we’re doing. And then we’re gonna plan on 15 minutes for your questions. Speaking of questions, we’re in webinar, so you can use the Q&A option, which you should be able to access in the Zoom toolbar. You can also pop them in the chat. There’s a lot of folks here today, so I’ll try to keep an eye on that. And as we get to the Q&A, you can put them there as well. They’re probably safest in the Q&A box, but know that you’ve got options there. Any questions on any of that? Again, I do have chat open and I welcome your questions. Okay, so let’s start with checking in. I wanna invite everybody into the chat, and if you go into the chat, there is a little emoji icon, a little smiley face, and you can click on that. And I wanna invite you to share an emoji that represents how you feel right now about integrating climate action into your teaching. I’m gonna go with this one. Thank you, folks, for playing along. I don’t think I’ve seen a repeat yet, so that’s kind of cool. I love that. I love that. If we all shared the same emoji, I think that would concern me. Lots of different feelings here. Amazing. Keep those feelings coming.

Sarah and I, I think share a philosophy of really meeting people where they are, both our students and the faculty that we work with. Rebecca, we welcome you here as a fellow educator. Folks, if you’re not teaching in a classroom, you’re teaching in hallways, you’re teaching in offices, you’re teaching in libraries, you’re teaching in your home, you’re welcomed here as educators, everybody. So this is a simple activity. I like to start with check-ins. I like the emoji check-in. It gives us some flexibility. If folks don’t wanna share an emoji, wanna share a word, you can share that as well. It’s a nice chance to integrate a pause in a very simple way and have people turn inward to see what’s going on. So you can use this with your students as a way to get them started, whatever that word students means to you. And if you’ve got more emojis to share, keep them coming. Okay, I have… Let me grab my alt text here ’cause I wanna put this in the chat. So on your screen, there is a list of callings and roles for collective liberation. So I’m gonna give you all one minute to look this over and I’m also gonna put a list of the callings. No, you’re not gonna misbehave. Everyone… No. Maybe it’s too big. It doesn’t like it because it’s too big. Yep. Okay, I’m dedicated to this. I’m invested now. So I’m gonna be putting these callings and roles in the chat and Zoom didn’t want them all at once, so they’re coming in, in four groups. But I wanted to share that there’s also alt text on the image in the slide deck. So I want you to take a look at these callings and roles.

This comes from an organization called Slow Factory. And when you feel ready, I’d like to invite folks if they are up for it, to sharing one of these that is standing out for you today that feels like a calling or role that you can play in the work of collective liberation. So take a minute. Mick, no worry about emoji. If you wanna share a word of how you’re doing today, we’d love to see that. Sarah’s got communicator. Phoebe’s saying many things, but an abolitionist always. Michelle has gone with the slash, we love to see it. Communicator/scientist, look at these roles coming through. I know my friend, Flower, and Flower has said communicator. That lands for me, Flower. Here’s a cool thing. Maybe find… I see two luminaries, Hannah and Laura. That would be a cool way to connect, right? Wonderful. Rebecca, did you say what’s luminary? Luminary is somebody who inspires people to rise beyond their expectations based on this-

– I like the bit about downloads from the universe under visionary.

– I saw that this morning and I said, I wonder how that will land with our academic audience. And there was a moment of hesitation and I said, you know what? Let’s roll with it. Let’s do-

– Well, this academic was fine with it.

– Listen, we need all the help we can get y’all. Wonderful. So one of the things we’re gonna talk about today is the importance, or I’m gonna talk about, I don’t know if Sarah’s gonna talk about it, but I’m gonna talk about is the importance in moving people from these climate emotions and using those emotions as guides and clues for art, the actions that we can take and that if we stay stuck in the climate emotions, the research is showing us that’s less than ideal and that we really wanna create a frame of, and what are those emotions telling you? What are they telling you about the work that you can offer in the world or the rest that you need to take or the community you want to join? So I love this activity because it starts out with sort of that action-based frame. And it’s fun, it’s colorful, it’s playful. Most of my… None of my students will ever say one. None of them will ever say one. They will say three, that is the minimum. I say choose one and they say three and I love it and I celebrate all of it. But I’ve used this with students repeatedly. It works well, particularly for an introductory discussion assignment. So I’m modeling that for you today. I hope you found that helpful.

The links for this are in the speaker’s notes as always. Okay, so now that we’ve got your climate action roles and ideas and emotions sort of percolating, I wanna give you a quick recap on Climate Action Pedagogy. So our first tenet, there’s three tenets in Climate Action Pedagogy. The first is accessibility. So what we’re not gonna do is leave anybody behind in this work. So it’s important that we are, as always, designing accessible learning experiences for all students. And we are also remembering that not only we’re not leaving anybody behind, but we recognize that marginalized folks and communities are the adaptability experts who know how to get things done with very few resources and many barriers in their way. So we want to center those amazing leaders of really strengths-based approach. The second tenet of CAP is emergent strategy. If you haven’t been introduced yet to the work of adrienne maree brown, who is one of my teachers, congratulations, your life’s about the change. Brown teaches the idea that small is all. So we prioritize small actions and we prioritize critical connections over critical mass. So this is very different from one of the models in higher ed where everything is expected to immediately be scaled. As soon as the idea comes into our mind, we must know how we’re going to scale it. Emergent strategy prioritizes critical connections. So it says the one person you meet in today’s webinar who you email later and say, “Can we do a Zoom coffee,” that is worth its weight in gold. The learning experience design is the third tenet of CAP. Who are your learners? In this moment, what do they want and need? And what is the context in which they are learning? That’s a fun question these days, right? And who are you? What do you want and need?

You matter in this equation. You, as an educator, matter and we need to take care of you. What is the context in which you are teaching and working? These are increasingly difficult answers that we’re coming up with, but we designed from that place of reality rather than from a place of magical thinking. Okay, and in the speaker’s notes, there are links to all the prior CAP presentations and workshops. Dasha is here from One Higher Ed. Dasha puts those websites together and it is… She is an angel. That is amazing work. It’s important work, it’s climate work because you all can access those freely. You can share them at your institution, you can use them in working groups, amazing resources. They’re all free, our prior CAP workshops. So if you dig this and you haven’t checked those out, please continue some learning asynchronously. Okay, so I’m gonna give you a broad overview now of some of the current research and thinking on climate anxiety in the classroom. What do we know? That’ll take me about 10 minutes. We’re actually doing good with time. I’m actually on time, I might cry. And then we have about 30 minutes where I get to ask Sarah questions and we get to learn from her.

Okay, so all of the links, by the way, for this data and this research are in the speaker’s notes. So if you wanna check those out, you can check it out there. This is from a Lancet article. So some of the most recent data we have on climate anxiety in adolescents and young adults is that the vast majority of them are at least moderately worried about climate change impacts. And the majority of them are very or extremely worried about climate change impacts. And, written in the Lancet, we expect these effects to continue to intensify as climate change intensifies. We have breached the 1.5 degrees of warming threshold and that is something many folks were hoping to avoid. We have breached it and we are certain we are in the climate change era and we expect this to intensify. Again, this is a Lancet article that I’m pulling this data from. This is from some research at the University of Oregon. Climate distress. This is also supported by some work at the Yale Climate Communications organization.

There’s some interesting data about climate distress. In some cases, when we hear frightening climate news, we can tend to shut down and say, I don’t wanna think about it. But there is significant data that shows that some climate distress is actually associated with increased collective action. So those feelings that we have about climate, the whole span of them, we’re gonna talk more about that, do seem to motivate people to take positive actions on behalf of our climate and life on this planet. I wanna read you this quote here. The author said, “Eco-anxiety is often portrayed in the media and literature is a pathological condition that needs to be cured. But based on this research, the author urged that we see climate anxiety as a rational emotional response. I love that it’s very rational to feel climate anxiety that can be channeled into empowerment. So that’s the frame I want us to get really clear about working with, that there’s nothing wrong with us for feeling this way. It’s actually very rational and that we can channel those emotions into empowerment in collective spaces with our students.

So you’re gonna see that repeated as a theme here. There’s a bunch of links to some research supporting this in the speaker’s notes, but I’ve summarized it for y’all here. So these are five things that we know fairly decisively about working with climate in the classroom. What seems to work is to give and co-design experiential learning experiences with our students that are local in nature. So getting our students involved on a local level where they have tremendous power to have an impact seems to work really well. This might be a quote from my therapist, I’m actually not sure, but be fair. Be fair. If you’re gonna take time in your classroom to imagine the worst, also take time to imagine the best. adrienne maree brown uses the phrase “imagination battles”. I love that. Engage in imagination battles with your students and imagine the best and brightest possible future. I’ve got got a link in the speaker’s notes for you all on the discipline, or what do I wanna call it? Theme of solar punk. If you haven’t gone down the solar punk rabbit hole, I highly recommend it. It’s about demanding and designing and imagining the best possible futures where all human needs are met in some really cool ways. We don’t wanna leave climate action to our environmental science faculty and staff alone. What will work best and what is working best is cross-institutional interdisciplinary approaches to climate action.

All courses are climate courses. Inviting our students to co-design solutions with us and giving students empowerment and learning leadership opportunities and remembering our scope of practice. Sarah and I are gonna talk about this a bit more. Scope of practice is remembering that you are not a therapist. Some of you might actually be therapists, but even if you are, if you’re teaching a course, you’re probably not that student’s therapist, right? So that’s still outside of your scope of practice to provide them with therapy. So remaining in your scope of practice as an educator and being clear about what you can and can’t do for your students, helps you to take care of them and to take care of yourself, okay? So that’s kind of like my top five takeaways from what we know on this topic thus far. Two more slides and I’m on time and we get to talk and ask Sarah some questions.

I wanna remind us that we’re not all experiencing climate change and climate anxiety in the same way. Someone on what was formerly known as Twitter, which I’m no longer a part of, I remember in the early 2020s I saw this tweet. It said something along the lines of, “We are all in the middle of this storm in the ocean, but we’re not all in the same boat,” right? We’re not all in the same kind of boat. Some people are in yachts. So I want us to keep that in mind. Three frames I can offer you, and there’s detailed resources in the speaker’s notes. Culturally relevant teaching is the work of Zaretta Hammond. She has an amazing book on… It’s “Culturally Relevant Teaching and the Brain”, I believe. So she takes a neuroscientific lens and applies it to CRT, remembering that not all of our students experience climate anxiety in the same way and taking a strengths-based approach to this, right? Or noting our students… What Ben Simone calls funds of knowledge, the amazing resources that our students bring to these conversations across various cultures. Welcoming and honoring those in our classroom.

Intersectionality, this is the work of Kimberly Crenshaw. So intersectionality reminds us that we are not all in the same relationship with power, and keeping that in mind as we work through climate anxiety. So we have human rights attacks taking place in the United States. Not everybody here is in the US context, but many of us are. And students who are the most marginalized and most vulnerable in those attacks are probably going to experience climate anxiety in a very different way than students who have a closer relationship to power and privilege. So being a smart inter… I think of inter… I know we’re probably… I don’t even wanna go down this road, but I think of intersectionality as good practical common sense. So I encourage others to join me in practicing it. And then last but not least, the minority stress model. This is the work of Meyer, but I also lean on the work of Monique Botha who has applied it to neurodivergent folks and remembering that the experience of being a marginalized human in this world is extremely stressful.

So again, if a student in your class is experiencing minority stress and we’re trying to engage them with climate anxiety conversations, they’re going to experience it differently. So being sensitive and aware of that. You don’t have to have all the answers. This is a bit of a wobble experience, but you can wobble together with your students. And my last sort of caveat or guide for us in terms of the what do we know about climate anxiety in the classroom is about climate anxiety and neurodivergence. There’s not a lot that’s been written on this. If you are hearing this and thinking, “Wow, that’s interesting, I’d like to learn more about it,” and you are a researcher or writer, they’re ready for you. This is wide open. So we don’t have a lot of data on this at all. It’s very much an emergent field, but we can make some… We can extrapolate some and make some generalizations based on existing research.

The quote I shared with you all today is, this one actually is from my therapist, “Exposure works great for anxiety and not at all for neurodivergence.” And of course this is… There’s a lot of overlap there as well. But Sarah I know is gonna talk to you probably, I’m assuming, about how when someone’s living with anxiety, facing the anxiety is often a tool for navigating it. And for folks like myself who are neurodivergent, that often does not lead to the same positive results. So what we can do is, and you don’t know who’s who, and you don’t need to know and you shouldn’t know because you’re not a therapist. But what you can do is to create supportive conditions for your students and work to co-design positive learning spaces for them. You’re gonna start with strengths because neurodivergent folks have lots of creativity and strengths that they can bring into this conversation. You’re gonna work to remove barriers in the classroom. This might look like providing content warnings, clear communication and structure, and being aware of the environmental design of the classroom as much as possible.

And of course, again, we need more research on this. Okay, my last resource for you in the general overview box is this amazing website, Climate Mental Health. They have climate emotion wheels that you can use with your students and I love it. They have like 50 different languages. So I was thinking about how cool it would be to do this in a foreign language learning class. I’m studying French. What a great way to teach French would be to engage with students through climate emotions. So I wanna link that to you there. That’s a great tool that you can use. Okay, I’m gonna shift this over to… 12:30. That’s never happened before. I wanna shift us over to the Q&A. So Sarah and I, I told you we’re friends IRL. This is us at Walden Pond a few years ago. We’re there with our friend, Rachel, who also works in faculty development and isn’t it… It’s kind of wild. Walden Pond is the setting for Thoreau’s famous environmental book and it’s not looking good there.

So there’s been a lot of stories in the news about Walden. Ironic, depressing, enraging, lots and lots of emotions come up. And it was also a place where three friends got together one day and connected in COVID times. So Sarah and I arrived before you today in this… inside of this tension and, in this reality, imperfectly and doing our best to have some important conversations about climate anxiety in the classroom. So I’m gonna start us off and I do have an eye on the chat, so if folks have questions, they can pop them in there. Or again, you can pop them in the Q&A. Oh no, not yet. 21. Sarah, my first question for you, what the heck is anxiety and how is climate anxiety unique? Or is it? Is climate anxiety the same thing or something different than anxiety? And how do both show up in the classroom?

– Great, big questions. So anxiety and climate anxiety is a type of anxiety. And anxiety in general is a perception that we don’t have the resources to cope with the threats that face us. But like this image of nature being reflected but also distorted by pond water and generally our brains don’t perceive an objective reality, everything is filtered through our perception, through our past experiences, through our hunger levels, through our biases, right? And so anxiety is about the future and about these perceptions, and sometimes it can be incorrect. So either about the threat or your resources. So some threats are indeed present and they’re huge, and I would include climate change in there. And sometimes you don’t have the resources to cope, but because it’s always in the future, however imminent, those perceptions can be incorrect.

So the threat is real. We’re past the realm of debate about climate change. We’re experiencing it. And some of the ramifications as anyone in South Carolina or Florida or California can tell you just using examples from the last year, how bad, how fast it will get. Those are still being determined and our resources to cope are also still being determined and changing, especially in the last six months. So on the screen now is a picture of me and my little brother. And so you asked about how climate anxiety is showing up in the classroom. I think it’s going to show up in very different ways depending on our students. You have already talked to Karen about the diversity in our courses and I think where students are sitting with climate and with climate anxiety is one of those ways that our students are going to vary. So my little brother here on the right, sticking his tongue out, he does not think about climate. He doesn’t think about anything in the future. He thinks all of us anxious people are dumb. Why we’re spending so much time thinking about these things that aren’t here yet and you’re going to have some Sarahs in your class and you’re going to have some Dans. And so there’s going to be a lot of variability. And so I would just think a little bit about that.

So next slide. The next slide is our friend. So This is Fine Dog. And another thing that I think we have to think about when we’re thinking about climate anxiety in the classroom is especially when we’re comparing it to other types of anxiety, which you asked me to do, a lot of other types of anxiety that show up in the classroom have to do with what we’re doing in the class, right? So it might be social anxiety during a small group activity, performance anxiety during a presentation, test anxiety while we’re finishing an exam. But unless we’re actively discussing climate in the class, which we may be doing, and I know… Sorry, we’re gonna be talking about that today. I think climate anxiety will mostly exist as more of a diffuse global sort of background noise anxiety, just raising everyone’s overall tension levels, which is why I think of This is Fine Dog and I think a lot of us are feeling right now, not just about climate, but the overall geopolitical moment. And so I think that those are some of the things that come up for me when I think about climate anxiety in the classroom specifically.

– And, Sarah, this idea of the future orientation, I think is very interesting to me in that some of the data I’ve read on climate is that one of the reasons it’s tough to get people to act is that they perceive it as a future problem. And that’s why I think working with students on a local solution can be really powerful because we’re inviting them to look around their local community and notice what’s all around them, right? And that seems to not only empower students to take action, but it also helps them to see what’s going on and to come more into the present moment, which I think is a very empowering frame and good for students, but also good socially. It’s a pro-social behavior because we’re pulling into the present moment and taking action where we can. And that seems to motivate people toward these positive actions.

– Right, and more and more, there’s gonna be more Sarahs in the classroom because it’s not gonna be future, right? More and more it’s going to be present.

– Yes, yes. Awesome. Thank you. Okay, my next question for Sarah, the literature distinguishes between climate anxiety and eco-grief. Can you talk to us about the nuances of these emotional experiences and how we might work with them in our classrooms?

– Sure. And so emotion scientists, we often think about emotions as preparedness for action as making it more or less likely. You are going to respond to whatever challenge is in front of you in an evolutionarily adaptive way. And that often involves either approach or avoidance. Both grief and anxiety, both sadness and fear are avoidance emotions. They provoke retreat. But grief is a lot more deadening to action, I think, than is anxiety. Because one way that they differ, even though they’re both withdrawal emotions, is that grief is post-goal, right? The outcome is already here. We’ve already lost, we’ve already been defeated and now we’re mourning. Whereas anxiety’s pre-goal. We’re nervous, we’re uncomfortable, and we want to withdraw, but we still have the option of approach of problem solving. And so we don’t always have a choice, of course, between whether we’re feeling anxious or whether we’re grieving. But I think anxiety is often in terms of getting out of the situation, the better approach. And spoiler alert, this might preview an upcoming question which is about mindsets and framing because to some degree, we do have some choice over our emotions.

– Hmm. It doesn’t often feel like it.

– No.

– I think I might be speaking… Yes, yes. Sarah, I think it’s interesting to me, this idea of these two things coexisting, right? And I’ve thought about this a lot with COVID, which we are still experiencing, that particularly in the first year of COVID, it was we not only had already lost so much and some people had personally lost loved ones, but then there was more to come that we were still dreading. So there’s this…unfortunately, we’ve already experienced and to varying degrees, so many people have lost homes and witnessed ecological loss in their communities. And so there’s a grief happening over the loss and anticipating what’s to come. So these are co-occurring.

– Right, and emotions are so messy. They’re always overlapping and co-occurring and influencing each other. Being in one state is gonna make it more likely you’ll experience another state down the line.

– My favorite definition of grief is from, I think it was in WandaVision. It was in one of the Marvel shows. And I hope I don’t spoil it for anybody, but when Wanda lost Vision, one of them said, “Grief is love persevering,” and I’ve always loved that. So when I think about that in terms of the climate, I like to think of emotions as e-motions. So I like to think of them as entities that want to move and to move us. And I think of grief as it’s what does that emotion want from me? And I think it wants me to express my love. And so when I have experienced loss, expressing my love for the person or the thing that has been lost is one of the ways I’ve worked with that emotion.

– Hmm. That’s beautiful.

– Thank you. Okay, folks in the chat sharing. Yes, Michelle, what is grief but love persevering. Okay. Yay, mindset. So there’s a great book called “The Upside of Stress” by Dr. Kelly McGonigal. You’ve read it right, Sarah?

– Yep.

– Okay, which is where I got some of… I definitely recommend it. And there’s a link on this in the speaker’s notes, really changed the way that I think about anxiety in general and in the classroom. There’s some good data on mindset that shows that how we frame challenges in the classroom impacts how our students experience those challenges. So short version, if we set up an experience as this is gonna be really hard and you’re you’re really gonna struggle with it, students tend to underperform. And if we take the same group of students in the same challenge and say, “You’ve got this, you can do this, it’s gonna be hard, but you can rise to the challenge,” then students perform better. So how should we consider the mindset and framing around climate anxiety? For example, if we frame this as a massive intractable problem versus a fixable tangible problem, something we can do something about, how might that impact student learning and anxiety in the classroom?

– Great. So I promise I’ll only leave this complex thing up for a minute, but this is the process model of emotion regulation. So I spent most of my early career studying emotion regulation or the processes and strategies that we use to regulate our emotions. And as you were saying, Karen, we don’t really have a choice over the emotion as it is first emerging, right? Emotions are very fast, they’re very reactive, but we do have choices as the emotion is unfolding and moving into the future and also its effects on our behavior. So we click the next slide. We’ll hone in on just one of these strategies, which is Cognitive Reappraisal, which has been found to be the most effective emotion regulation strategy, the most adaptive one. If all of us who have been in therapy, have been in working with someone who is at all cognitive, we’re familiar with cognitive reappraisal. It’s just taking that perception of either the threat or your resources to cope and working on it, seeing if we can spin it a little more positive, such as maybe thinking we have more resources than we thought, or reframing the situation as not all hope lost because that might spin us more toward grief and instead to that sort of motivated nervousness that we were talking about before. So are there ways that we can reframe to focus on what we can do, what next small step or action? Just everything that Karen was just saying, I won’t repeat all her great thoughts. I think that, that is a very science supported way to approach these emotions and lead them to action. So next slide. Just a personal note. On the screen is a picture of my cousin Summer Pretorius. She’s jumping joyously in front of some waves. Summer is a federal climate scientist. So you have to imagine that she has plenty of anxiety right now and plenty of eco-grief, but she also has joy. She tries to focus on what she can do in the next day, the next hour to avert what she sees coming in her graphs and in her data. And I think that she’s a great model for what Karen is talking about here. You’re on mute.

– Had to do it once ’cause I like to model that for everybody that, that still happens five years in. So I’m teaching… One of the courses I’m teaching is called Active Hope and the students start off checking in with where they are in the moment and then they brainstorm local problems that they want to address. And last week they were talking about the problems and I said, what’s the biggest challenge? So all of them were like, it’s so big, it’s so hard. I’m never gonna be able to convince people. This week’s reading was the work of Donella Meadows who is one of the big systems thinking folks. And she has a concept called leverage points, which is very similar to adrienne maree brown’s small is all. And the concept of leverage points is to find the smallest action that can have the biggest impact. And I like to frame that as play the game of small. And when my students have started sharing in the discussion this week about leverage points and seeing them connect that to last week where they were like, “This is gonna be so hard,” and then saying, “Wait a minute, what’s the leverage point in this huge problem?” It’s like night and day. And it’s so exciting and I recommend everybody teaches or takes this course. But what’s the smallest thing I can do to have the biggest impact is I think a great example of cognitive reappraisal versus, oh my gosh, this is so awful.

The other big reframe that’s worked for me is one of my previous therapists said, “Karen, there are millions of smart caring people working on turning this around. There are millions of people taking climate action every single day.” So it’s very easy to get stuck on what’s not happening. But like I said, I like to be fair. I’m a Libra after all. So I got to give full credit to the millions of people like the person in this picture and all of you here today who are taking action. Okay, next question. Let’s talk about faculty’s climate anxiety on top of political anxiety, social anxiety, still in COVID times anxiety, personal anxiety. Yeah, let’s talk about that. It’s hard to help our students when we are struggling. What can professors who are feeling bogged down by their own climate anxiety do? They might be asking, do I really have to teach about this when it feels so threatening to even think about it? So do you have any words of wisdom for faculty in processing their own anxiety and while trying to teach this to students?

– Great. So I think I’ll take the last part first. So we have an image here of a highway with bi-directional pointing sign. And I think at that end of the day, no one can tell you what you have to teach. I’m a huge believer in faculty autonomy in both content and technique. Teach what you want, how you want. But I think if you’re in this webinar and you’re reading some of Karen’s writing and you’re moved by her argument that all courses are climate courses and that this is an existential emergency and that we need all hands on deck, I think that there are ways to give students intellectual tools to improve our global situation in those small ways that we’ve been talking about that don’t focus right on climate if it’s just too much for you. So having students hone their argumentative skills can help them persuade someone else of climate action in their daily lives. Learning to write well can lead to some great editorials. Working on information literacy can help us discern the truth. And, maybe, that’s a little too loose in interpretation of Karen’s argument, but I think that those small actions can have really big impact, especially since right now, one of the biggest things that we can do for climate is to fight for our democracy, which might involve other forms of civic action. But for the bit about being bogged down by climate anxiety, I do think that we need to take care of ourselves before taking on big new emotional challenges.

At Simmons University where I work, I did a wonderful fireside chat with my colleague, Eugenia Knight. She’s a clinical social worker and actually is a clinician. And in that fireside chat I asked her, Eugenia, what do our students need to support their mental health? And next slide. She said, “For our students to be well, they need us to be well.” And I just had to stop talking. It blew me away. I wrote essay about it. I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. But it just confirms what I’ve been hearing in my own qualitative research with faculty about their emotions with student emotions in the classroom. A lot of the researching and writing I’ve been doing on emotional contagion and transmission and teaching, I think we need to start with care for ourselves. I think Karen’s scope of practice work here is so illuminating. Rebecca Pope-Ruark on Burnout, Lindsey Masland on Pedagogical Values. There’s a lot of, interestingly, mostly women writing in this space helping us figure out how to prioritize ourselves so that we can both be there for ourselves, the planet, and our students. And in terms of what we can do to mitigate our own climate anxiety and point us back to cognitive reappraisal, this is another wonderful book, kind of similar to Kelly McGonigal’s book that Karen mentioned earlier, but a little more of a physiological basis is by a clinical psychologist called Future Tense. And it’s really about the overlap between the biology and cognition of motivation and anxiety. And she writes a lot about how we can tap into our anxiety to try to do all the things we were talking about earlier, take that arousal about all of our concern and our worry and direct it at action. And so there’s a book recommendation for you.

– I am unmuted. Okay, so let’s say I chose one of my favorite books and one of the greatest writers, sci-fi writers who I was lucky enough to get introduced to in college, Octavia Butler, who is part of the teaching lineage of adrienne maree brown to use in this example, folks might be familiar with Butler’s work, “Parable of the Sower” and the sequel, “Parable of the Talents.” It is considered a classic sci-fi novel and it’s very popular, I hear. I’m not on there, but I hear on BookTok. It also happens to be violent, a violent apocalyptic novel. Let’s say I am an educator and I’m a huge Butler fan. And I think this novel speaks to our current era exceptionally well. If you’re familiar with the book, it speaks to it scarily well to our current moment. Can I teach this kind of content, whether it’s Parable the Sower or other sort of violent, apocalyptic, dystopian type novels or works, can I do that and also honor my students and my own climate anxiety?

– So people who arrived early-

– [Karen] Hi, Jim.

– Joking about this slide earlier, Karen wants to post it places, but I have a story for you in response to this question. So in Fall of 2019, when Jim and I were both still at Assumption University in Worcester, we co-taught, well it wasn’t really co-taught, it was like linked, it was like one of those situations where you link the two courses and you meet together a few times. My intro psych class and his intro lit class. And I talked him into letting us assign “Station Eleven” in his intro lit class, which for those of you who haven’t read the book, is about a pandemic that actually is much worse than the pandemic that we went through. Something like 95% of of people on the planet die. And so Jim and I talked a lot in March of 2020 about that and did it turn out, was it good for the students? Did it give them some skills like think, okay, humanity will make it out in some form, prepare them in some way or did it make the whole thing so much worse? Especially when the pandemic just started and it turned out awful, but it was better than the book. But we didn’t know that at first, right? And did we traumatize them? We were really concerned. But then he had… One of the students was his advisee and she came into his office and he asked her. He said, “Was it terrible that we had read this book or did you in some way find it reaffirming or reassuring?” And she said, “Oh, I never made that connection,” but there was a pandemic in that book and then there was a pandemic.

So maybe they were all just fine, neither better nor worse. So that’s what your question made me think. But we can go to the next slide. I do think that it could have been both, right? It could have made it worse for some students and better for other students. I do know that, and there’s a lot of literature on this, fiction reading does give us some models for sense-making, for coping, for seeing a path out of crisis. And so in those ways it can be, I think good for us, good for our students to read them. It can be a powerful tool in our classes. I think that Karen already mentioned content warnings, setting up the assignments in a careful way and acknowledging, perhaps giving options, having a couple different novels that people could read that all are going to serve the same intellectual purpose and having students have all the information they need to make that choice ahead of time is probably the route that I would take.

– Thank you for this, Sarah. I have a little story about cli-fi as it’s sometimes called. I last… About last year I joined a cli-fi, climate fiction reading book, reading club, reading group. And my streak of never being able to remain in book clubs continues. They were all dystopian novels. I probably should have not joined knowing that going in, but I was also, like many people, trying to find community with like-minded folks. So I suffered through the first session where we were talking about this dystopian novel that I was not… I wasn’t able to actually read any of the books. I would read the back of them and just be like, I’ll just go and talk about it as best I can because I would start them. And I was so completely overwhelmed that I had to stop. And I got through the first couple sessions and the way that folks were talking about it, just so my… I am autistic and ADHD. I don’t think I… I don’t know if I had my autism diagnosis at the time, but I’ve gotten it since. And it gives a lot of clarity now. I needed some… If I was going to read one of those books, I would’ve been able to read one of those books, not seven. I would’ve needed to move much more slowly. I would’ve needed much more space to process. I would’ve needed a lot of other things to get through that experience. I left and I didn’t share why I left.

So one of my concerns is that we often don’t to remember the students you don’t hear from just as much as the students that you do. And in this example, I was one of the… I wasn’t gonna say, “Hey, this is too much for me. ’cause I felt a sense of shame at some points for not being able to participate. So I love your suggestion of choice. I also just I wanna make a case here for the extremely sensitive neurodivergent folks in the room and in our classes that it’s not that we can’t or don’t want to engage in communities of learning, but we just might need more support and more time and to be aware of that. So this is a big conversation but I think we did a good job of handling it and giving folks some ideas. Okay, one of the CAP frames, one of the Climate Action Pedagogy frames is that action is an antidote to despair. I think this aligns well with your work in ‘Mind over Monsters.’ Can you talk about how those frames can be used in a college classroom across disciplines? What about students or educators whose despair feel so immense that they might feel unable to take action?

– Right, absolutely. So we’ve talked a lot about the emotions that provoke withdrawal, right? I think for most of this 25 minutes or however long it’s been, things like anxiety, fear, sadness, despair, grief. But the flip side of why we have emotions is that they also motivate approach and it’s a whole other set of emotions. Things like joy, curiosity, hope, awe, but not all positive. Anger is a motivating approach to motivation, for instance, that a lot of us find uncomfortable but has good approach motivations. I think if we tap into these juicy approach motivations in our teaching and learning, we can motivate action to change. And so I would think if folks are so overwhelmed by despair, as you say that they feel kind of frozen to focus more on the approach motivations. And I think our students are hungry for that. They’re hungry for both the approach and the action. And in a lot of ways, approach is more challenging than avoidance because you have to often get vulnerable. You could mess up, you could fail, you could look dumb in front of your colleagues. But the rewards are so great and we focused on more an emotion than motivation today.

But if you look at our major theory of intrinsic motivation, self-determination theory, our three strongest psychological needs are autonomy, competence, and relatedness. And I think over the last few years, we’ve focused a lot on that autonomy or choice or agency and relatedness. And I think that’s wonderful and I hope that I’ve been a part of that work. But I think that we also need to focus on the competence part because I think it’s so important. It’s such a deep psychological need. And I think our students really are craving to feel effective, right? And to feel like you’re doing something and it matters and it makes a ding in the universe. And so I think focusing in on the classroom on that is really where we could go. Next slide although I don’t remember what it is. Oh right, and you mentioned Mind over Monsters, and so this is I think partly core of my approach of compassionate challenge, right? That we need all the relatedness, the care, all of the compassion, but we also need to focus on an intellectual challenge, on things like competent, building competence and self-efficacy. And so I’m not gonna read all these things out, but essentially it’s a blend of all of these things like flexibility, but also having guardrails and scaffolding of time management as just one example that we need all of this to really focus on approach to problem solving.

– Okay, we’re actually really good on time here. This is our last question that I have and then we can shift over to your questions. I see there’s already two in the Q&A and folks might wanna start adding more there. How can I avoid overstepping into trying to treat or manage or even sort of address my students’ anxiety in the college classroom? How can I avoid overstepping? How might I recognize it, my students’ anxiety, and support my students and at the same time, still stay in my scope of practice as an educator, not a therapist?

– Great. Well, I absolutely agree. I don’t think that we should be treating anxiety in the classroom. For the most part, we’re not that kind of doctor as you already talked about. And I don’t think it’s in our scope of practice. And where I really tried to focus in terms of supporting students in their competence development and in their rising to the challenge is really focusing on the positive. So focusing on those approach motivations. And so this is a screenshot from one of my talks. On the right is a picture of a recent systematic review of emotional wellbeing, what it is and why it matters. And then on the left, I’ve summarized it for you. So emotional wellbeing, what is it? It is positive emotions, regular experience of them, a sense of meaning and purpose, life satisfaction, and I think competence really falls in here. And self-efficacy -is my life, am I achieving what I want to achieve? And the ability to pursue self-defined goals. And those four things are the building blocks to emotional wellbeing.

But I think that there are also the building blocks of a really great college course, right? And if our students are going through our institutions and all of their courses experiencing all four of these things, then we are building resistance, resilience. Someone really great once said something about resilience, being that we get correct care and support and resilience blooms all on its own. And that I think is really well demonstrated by the systematic review. And then where that exposure thing comes in, this bottom bolded bit is not from the review. This is from me, but again, I don’t think we should be doing any kind of therapy in the classroom. But I think that we regularly, in our syllabi, our assignments, our assessments, we regularly ask students to take small degrees of cognitive or emotional vulnerability and risk taking in a safe, compassionate setting. And so I think that, that too builds wellbeing. So let’s not treat anything. Let’s build wellbeing.

– Sarah, I like to thank you so much for this. I like to say that… I’m gonna move you to your last slide. I like to say that we create conditions, so think of it as setting up the garden.

– Yeah.

– Speaking of gardening, as we were earlier, we can’t control the weather, but we can create conditions in the garden and let the chips fall where they may. So that was a great list of conditions. You’ve got a final slide here that you wanted to share with final thoughts for folks?

– Yeah, I like ending on quotes, and this is just a quote from one of my favorite higher education writers, Chris Emdin. And he talks about the joy of teaching, and that if we want to be an effective educator who creates academically rigorous instruction, that our teaching must be centered around the infusion of life and of joy. That rigor, if we break it down, is really about being loud, proud, mobile, unpretentious, and challenged to take on whatever obstacles comes one’s way. And I think that’s a really wonderful reframing and reclaiming of the word rigor.

– We’ve seen interesting uses of the word rigor in higher ed. So I’m gonna stop sharing the slides in a minute. I wanna invite folks to check in, in the chat. How you doing? How you doing? If you wanna share an emoji or a word to let us know how you’re doing today. And I just popped in the chat as well. If you’re looking for some more community, I host a free virtual monthly climate circle with the folks at AASHE, and y’all are invited. It’s a half hour the first Wednesday of the month. There’s more details on my climate action website. So we’re not gonna leave you hanging. There are continued supports if you’re curious about doing this work.