Paper 8542 - Climate Change across Campus--ALL of Campus

Abstract:

Climate change is an “all-hands-on-deck” challenge: it will affect everyone, everyone can find something to offer, and we will need people from all walks of life to face it adequately. Thus a curriculum on this problem needs to be thoroughly multidisciplinary: not just for students in the Earth, natural, and social sciences, though of course they are important, but for all interested students. It should create well-informed generalists who grasp the overall picture and the range of available expertise and can ask intelligently for help from specialists. This presentation will offer some relevant lessons learned through the work of Changing Climates @ Colorado State, a multidisciplinary climate change education and outreach initiative.

A climate change curriculum needs at least one truly multidisciplinary course, and such a course needs many instructors, most practically in the form of visiting speakers, who need to be well coached in advance. It needs a curious and flexible supervising instructor and readings that students can actually understand—and that will engage their minds, imaginations, even feelings. These readings need to cover the globe but should probably focus on North America, since local information is the most effective, and their writers need to be diverse in gender, race, and ethnicity. Speakers and readings need to provide both a realistic picture and authentic grounds for optimism; to leave students feeling not hopeless but energized, they must offer a wide choice of actions personal to professional, daily to lifelong.

Throughout such a course and curriculum, simplification and translation are critical. Because disciplines differ in their questions, their language, the evidence they consider, their methods, and the conclusions they value, experts do not readily understand each other. Very often, a discipline’s most basic elements are the most important to communicate: how greenhouse gases operate and why scientists know we have a climate problem; what is meant by “discounting the future” or “fixing” carbon or “fairness” or “vulnerability” or “cultural work”; how we are very often moved by values and emotions rather than pure reason.