Despite the overwhelming evidence for the existence of climate change, news items bemoaning the lack of political will to tackle the issue are depressingly commonplace. And it’s not only a problem among policy makers. As Drew Bush, a PhD student at the MSE and the Department of Geography explained, “A lot of the literature about climate change perceptions suggests that the more information you give people, the less they care about the issue.”
For his PhD, Bush is working on developing an educational model to combat precisely this relationship between increased information and increased apathy. He is using a NASA-designed climate change modeling system to design hands-on curriculum for students across North America.
By making students an integral part of the scientific process, he hopes that this kind of interactive educational paradigm will help empower them to tackle climate change. As Bush explained, “Although more people are aware of climate change, most people don’t have the tools they need to understand it or to change their behaviour.”
Instead of simply absorbing information compiled by other researchers, Bush’s “hands on, citizen science curriculum” would allow students to become part of the research themselves. His computer-based model, developed by NASA, allows the user to control about eighty variables and produce results that approach the most sophisticated programs used by professional climate scientists.
Student-centered and driven projects like this will hopefully “bring human values into thinking about teaching and communicating climate change.” Bush is implementing his new curriculum with high-school, CEGEP and university students in Quebec and the rest of Canada as well as in the United States, including a joint-venture with the New York City public school system.
Though his project is focused on academic settings, Bush hopes that some of its lessons will apply more broadly, including in adult education. One of the key components of his research is to determine how various geographical and social factors contribute to the way people think about climate.
Bush cited the example of places “where the community is really based on natural resources that could be affected by climate change” as well as “other things that relate to place too, like politics and ideology and worldview,” and it is these factors that might provide valuable insights into bringing climate change into the public consciousness outside of an academic context.
-Emilio Comay del Junco
