INDUSTRIES Climate Curriculum

The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has called the climate crisis “a battle for our lives.” In 2022, a UN report called education one of the most important weapons in that fight. And at Penn GSE, the Center for Professional Learning has enlisted in the battle with its new Project-Based Learning for Global Climate Justice program.

“It's not enough for teachers just to teach students about climate change, they need to get students involved and starting to make a real impact in their communities, in their classrooms,” said Taylor Hausburg, GRD’22, teacher program lead for Center for Professional Learning. “And we know how to do that through project-based learning. That’s one pedagogy that gets students starting to do things, having real impacts on real audiences in real ways.”

Launched last fall, the inaugural cohort of more than 100 educators from over 20 countries were able to attend free of charge thanks to funding from the Penn Environmental Innovations Initiative and Penn’s South Asia Center. This interdisciplinary virtual professional development program brought them together to design and implement climate justice-related projects for their classrooms.

The semester-long program was broken into three parts. First, the participants asynchronously explored resources gathered and created by the Center’s team to better understand climate justice issues. They then came together to start imagining authentic questions their students might explore and begin sketching out projects that could answer those questions. And finally, they returned to their classrooms to implement those projects with students in their local contexts with ongoing support from a small team of fellow educators from the program.

Project-Based Learning for Global Climate Justice leverages Penn GSE’s expertise in project-based learning with University-wide expertise in the scientific and economic issues related to climate change. Participating teachers undertook projects with their students—many of which are still ongoing—exploring everything from local agriculture and food assistance during natural disasters to the effects of climate change on local plants. (The latter of which was the project of one of the local Philadelphia participants: Nicholas WhitefeatherManning.)

“We're supporting educators to pursue ambitious and authentic approaches to teaching and learning,” says Zachary Herrmann, executive director of the Center for Professional Learning. “A program like this can help teachers align their values and goals as educators with their actual practice and connects them with similarly passionate educators across the globe, since we have participants across five continents so far. These teachers are forming powerful networks and communities that can be used to share resources, give and receive coaching and feedback, and learn alongside each other as they implement their projects.”

Hausburg and Herrmann were excited by the results of the program’s first year and were accepted to share it last December at the International Conference on Inclusive Education and Project-Based Learning for Peace and Development at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Their presentation was well-received, and now the Center for Professional Learning team is parsing the data from last year’s participants in preparation for a new cohort of the program this fall. The team continues to forge new domestic and international partnerships to build their growing community of educators committed to bringing global climate justice into classrooms—and out into the world.