Instructional Strategies for Climate Education in the Classroom: Storytelling about Our Place in the Earth System

It is essential that we prepare tomorrow’s scientists, engineers, and communities to respond to the ongoing climate and environmental crises to plan for a sustainable future. Successfully addressing these needs requires contextualizing learning and using student-centered teaching practices that help learners construct an understanding of the world around them. For this reason, local phenomena can successfully anchor instructional storylines—coherent sequences of lessons that connect to students’ lives and engage them in synthesizing various scientific concepts to explain how the world works and why it changes through time. Students should reflect on how they are a part of the Earth system, and how individual and collective actions can address climate and environmental problems. These shifts in teaching practices are supported by tools developed by the Understanding Global Change (UGC) Project at the University of California Museum of Paleontology to investigate the causes, consequences, and solutions to the climate crisis.