B. Rosas:
I have been at Climate Generation for over a year now and have had the pleasure of meeting amazing environmental justice advocates, like Dr. Michelle Garvey, who teaches at the University of Minnesota. We first got to know each other during a campaign to shut down a harmful incinerator, the HERC, which has been polluting the Northside of Mpls for over a decade. These efforts are essential to the Twin Cities EJ movement and important to educate our students around, so they can see EJ lessons in real life and get activated.
Growing up in South Minneapolis, I did not receive much climate change education, let alone climate justice education. It’s not that my school didn’t teach anything about the climate crisis, but rather, that education remained shallow. Over a week or so, climate science was taught, but I wish the topic had extended beyond one unit in my 7th grade science class.
Even after learning about climate change and its effects on our lives and health, I still wasn’t activated to take action. It’s not that I didn’t care, but because my education was fear-based rather than solutions-based, I couldn’t see how young people could address it. Meanwhile, other challenges I saw my community facing, like housing insecurity, economic inequity, and racial injustice, seemed disconnected from climate change. This was because I was never taught climate justice.
I do believe that my teachers at the time did want to teach about Climate Change and Climate Justice, but didn’t have the resources to integrate these lessons into our daily curriculum. This is why our Climate Justice Education bill is crucial, as it will give educators guidance on how to teach climate justice and activate their students to not only care, but take action. Luckily there are already educators, of all grades, integrating Climate Justice Education into their curriculum.
As a UMN alum, I was pleasantly surprised to learn about the environmental justice course offered through the Sustainability Studies Program and taught by Michelle Garvey. I was sent the syllabus and in awe of the different topics that would be covered, along with the resources Michelle provided her students- it was the first time I actually saw a Climate Justice Curriculum in its entirety. When Michelle asked about a collaboration between her class and I, there was no hesitation in saying yes.
Michelle Garvey:
I’d been so impressed with B.’s environmental justice (EJ) advocacy work for Climate Generation in the Twin Cities long before we’d met. B. is dedicated, knowledgeable, and passionate about grassroots organizing, so I was delighted when they accepted my invitation to be our Spring 2024 SUST3017: Environmental Justice course partner. They brought firsthand experience as a frontline EJ leader, a youth and UMN alumni perspective relatable to undergrad students, and creative lessons on political change-making over the course of four months.
These are meaningful assets for our class community, because long before EJ is a scholarly pursuit, it is a social movement. This implies that in order to convey EJ truer to its values, I believe we must collaborate with frontline leaders and produce projects of benefit to the movement.
Further, in order to teach EJ effectively–creating lasting memories of connection and empowerment–experiential, place-based learning is critical. To that end, SUST3017 incorporates off-campus experiences, such as the bus tour of North Minneapolis we embarked upon with Community Members for Environmental Justice.
The centerpiece of this semester’s partnership with B. was a state bill Climate Generation helped conceive years ago: K-12 Climate Justice Education (House File 2297 and Senate File 476). I’ve tracked this bill with interest, and wondered whether a class of undergrads could both see it cross the finish line, and even help build out the climate justice (CJ) curriculum a Minnesota Department of Education taskforce would eventually develop. So I reached out to B., who was thankfully receptive!
To prepare both for political advocacy on the bill as well as to develop CJ lessons, we held in-class conversations with the current stewards of the bill–MN Rep. Larry Kraft and MN Sen. Nicole Mitchell–as well as climate literacy expert Nick Kleese, Community Engagement Director at UMN’s Center for Climate Literacy.
B. Rosas:
Michelle does a great job at taking her EJ lessons into the real world and connecting EJ to other social issues. During our partnership, her students and I covered:
- State and local EJ campaigns and how they could join each initiative. We discussed Climate Generation’s involvement with the Zero Burn Coalition to shut down the HERC, the coalition to implement the 2023 Cumulative Impacts Law, and the Twin Cities Boulevard initiative for highway removal.
- Legislative advocacy: We reviewed how a bill becomes state law, how students can locate their elected officials and potential bills of interest, and how they can advocate for or against issues of importance to them through letter-writing, Capitol rallies, and hearing testimonies.
Introduction to climate change education: To contextualize the CJ bill that embodied the focal point of our partnership, I introduced the Green Learning framework by the Center for Universal Education at Brookings. Then I facilitated feedback sessions on the CJ bill to explore what students could add to an eventual curriculum.
Michelle Garvey:
The final projects students produced are full of intelligent, creative, action-oriented, and hopeful ways to engage Minnesota’s elementary, middle, and high school students with the CJ movement. While no one in our class was an education major–so we could not be described as education experts!–we could indeed offer expertise in the history, leadership, challenges, and outcomes of climate justice. As such, our class was uniquely prepared to ideate activities true to the global CJ movement for lessons curriculum experts could eventually fine-tune to meet state standards.
We began by designing a more robust definition of CJ than the current bill utilizes:
Climate justice is:
A global movement to recognize the disproportionate impacts of climate change on those least responsible for it; resist the root causes of climate inequity; and repair the fractured relationships that perpetuate hierarchies among peoples, nations, and species; so ecosystems may be revisioned as commons—land, water, atmosphere—that support and sustain all life on Earth.
Then we developed a list of CJ learning objectives that each lesson plan would have to address:
Climate Justice Learning Objectives:
- Align one’s understanding of climate justice with the most contemporary consensuses on climate science
- Understand local-to-global case studies
- climate injustice
- climate justice
- Using an intersectional conceptual framework, appreciate both historical & contemporary drivers (i.e. systems, structures, norms) of global climate inequity
- Know the history of the climate justice movement: its vision, goals, and methods
- Critically evaluate
- measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change
- measures to deliver climate justice
- Imagine a climate just future:
- appreciate current projects and policies that deliver climate justice
- envision climate just projects and policies yet to be implemented
- Explore climate justice networks for:
- community building
- emotional & psychological support
- career building
- Know how to leverage one’s power to implement change
Students broke into pairs or small groups according to desired subject matter and grade level. They grounded their lesson plans in stories of frontline experiences. For example, Wangari Speaks Out was selected by Julius Mims, Max Pritchard, and Maddie Robinson:
From this foundation, lesson plans seemed to fall under the general categories of data analysis, creative approaches, interactive labs, and applied thinking. Below I share highlights within these categories:
DATA ANALYSIS
A Story Map was created by Will Arent and Jill Lonning to illustrate how certain historical decision-making processes result in segregation. Using Minneapolis as a case study, high school social studies students are invited to draw conclusions about how a dozen or so maps depicting data on how, e.g., redlining, tree canopy, industrial zoning, park space, or surface temperatures paint the picture of environmental and climate injustice.
CREATIVE APPROACHES
- Takyra Baugh and Shea Hildebrant facilitate a scrapbooking activity for a high school English lesson: students research a prominent CJ activist, then create the scrapbook in the first person point of view. This lesson familiarizes students with CJ history, while an accompanying lesson on reliable CJ resources builds critical thinking skills.
LABS
- Niko, Amara, and Jacob also offer a fire-burning STEM lab on the cultural and ecological import of controlled burns for Indigenous cultural continuance as well as restoration and resilience against climate change-induced wildfires.
APPLIED THINKING
- For a K-2 community health lesson, Lilly Stahr, Bijou Acers, and Pedro De Filippo Vannucci curated a list of books that address age-appropriate subtopics of climate justice. Teachers can consult the list and either adapt books to their own classroom needs, or apply a suite of accompanying activities developed by this group.
For example, Matt de la Peña’s book Last Stop on Market Street was selected to spur conversations on public transportation, access, and mobility. An optional field trip–a bus ride through town–can inspire children to reflect upon their own experiences with public transit, our need for efficient, zero-carbon mass transit, and what is revealed to them about their town as the bus transports them from place to place.
Each of these engaging activities demonstrate how broadly applicable, creative, empirically-driven, collaborative, and/or resiliency-building CJ education can be. I’m proud of this class of burgeoning “curriculum designers” for imagining ways to equip youth for our climate-changed reality with methods of understanding, analysis, community-building, and problem solving.
B. Rosas:
Although our Climate Justice Education bill did not obtain a hearing this legislative session, we will continue our efforts to get it passed in 2025. Thanks to Climate Generation partners like Michelle and her class, we are learning more about how we can improve the bill and create an impactful CJ program for K-12 students in Minnesota. We’re grateful for Michelle’s ongoing solidarity, and we are excited to keep working with her!
Michelle Garvey:
And I am excited to continue supporting your advocacy, B.! Because of you, Climate Generation, and the youth who continue to inspire the Climate Justice Education bill, Minnesota will one day have the most robust, cutting-edge climate justice curriculum in the nation.
One final thing: because my course focuses on leverage points to create social change, each project group added an “advocacy” component to their lesson plan designed to leverage the activity by bringing it to wider audiences beyond the classroom. Because we still need to advocate for the CJ Education Bill, these components are perhaps more useful than ever. So we encourage readers to either utilize, or gain inspiration from, the following ideas to leverage your power on behalf of the global climate justice movement:
- Communicate the need for CJ education through social media outlets, as Zoe Freeby, Jackie Martinez, Will Herbek, Maria Hanson, and Isabella Crotteau demonstrate with these model Instagram posts:
- Create and disseminate zines to educate the public about various CJ topics, modeled here by Niko Ashpande, Amara Jackson, and Jacob Gontjes:
- Utilize this template, introduced to our class by B., to contact your elected official, informing them about the necessity of CJ education in our schools!
B. serves as Policy Manager for Climate Generation. They are a Minneapolis Southsider and first generation graduate of the University of Minnesota. B. has several years experience in community organizing and policy work and is excited to bring their experiences in voting rights and housing advocacy to Climate Generation’s climate justice work. They believe in investing in our young leaders to build a better future and sustain movement work and have centered the voices of young people in previous campaigns. B. is a participant in the Wilder Foundation’s Community Equity Program, a nine-month political leadership cohort-based learning journey for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color community leaders and change makers.
Dr. Michelle Garvey is an organizer and environmental and climate justice educator at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. There, she teaches with community experts on the frontlines of struggles, e.g., for zero burn, resilience hubs, community farms, just energy transition, and climate justice education.
