1st Edition

Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference

By Richard Beach, Jeff Share, Allen Webb Copyright 2017
    158 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    158 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    CO-PUBLISHED BY ROUTLEDGE AND THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents is THE essential resource for middle and high school English language arts teachers to help their students understand and address the urgent issues and challenges facing life on Earth today. Classroom activities written and used by teachers show students posing questions, engaging in argumentative reading and writing and critical analysis, interpreting portrayals of climate change in literature and media, and adopting advocacy stances to promote change. The book illustrates climate change fitting into existing courses using already available materials and gives teachers tools and teaching ideas to support building this into their own classrooms. A variety of teacher and student voices makes for an appealing, fast-paced, and inspiring read. Visit the website for this book for additional information and links.

    All royalties from the sale of this book are donated to Alliance for Climate Education.

     

    Chapter 1: Why Teach about Climate Change In English Language Arts

    Chapter 2: Getting Started in Teaching about Climate Change

    Chapter 3: Creating Climate Change Curriculum

    Chapter 4: Literature and the Cli-Fi Imagination

    Chapter 5: Writing about Climate Change

    Chapter 6: Critical Media/Digital Analyses of Climate Change

    Chapter 7: Using Drama and Gaming To Address Climate Change

    Chapter 8: Interdisciplinary Teaching about Climate Change

    Chapter 9: Acting in the Present: Changing the Future

    Biography

    Richard Beach is Professor Emeritus of English Education at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA.

    Jeff Share is Teacher Education Faculty Advisor, University of California Los Angeles, USA.

    Allen Webb is Professor of English Education and Postcolonial Studies at Western Michigan University, USA.

    "The scientists and engineers have done their work, providing a timely warning on climate change and producing the technologies like solar panels that would help take it on. It's the rest of us that have so far failed, and it's largely a failure of...imagination, precisely the reason that we have English class. This book will help many teachers understand their craft in light of the planet's great crisis."

    Bill McKibben, Editor, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

    "I’m always looking for topical and innovative subjects to discuss with my high school students. This book can be used both as a good resource to justify the teaching of climate change in my curriculum and to help me teach it as well."

    Cara Arver, English Teacher/English Department Chair, Centreville High School, USA

    "This book is fantastic!  It is beautifully written, thorough in its approach to content, and powerfully presented.  We need this book!  It provides a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the crises we are facing and how ELA teachers can begin to address those problems with their students today.  Students will be awakened to an important critical analysis as well as what they can and should do to respond in their own communities.  I applaud Beach, Share, and Webb!"

    Rebecca A. Martusewizc, Eastern Michigan University, USA

    "Too often, climate change education is regarded as the responsibility of science teachers, and occasionally of social studies teachers. In Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents, Richard Beach, Jeff Share, and Allen Webb argue that it is the urgent responsibility of English teachers to help students think critically about, and take action on, “the issue of our age, climate change and environmental justice.” The authors lay out compelling arguments for why that is the case, but perhaps most significantly, they offer readers a treasury of novels, non-fiction books, stories, films, and teaching activities that show how to bring climate issues to life in the Language Arts classroom...Through classroom examples and resource suggestions, Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents offers teachers tools to cut through those modes of concealment."

    Bill Bigelow, Linda Christensen, and Deborah Menkart, Rethinking Schools