Teaching Toward an
Understanding of Climate Change
Marisha Plotnik
From In Context #53 (Fall, 2025)
In February, we hosted our third Climate Colloquium at the Nature Institute. We continue to offer this professional development opportunity for teachers who are trying to address the topic of climate change with their students in ways that develop both clear, objective understanding of the processes involved and also warm-hearted resolve to work for the Earth’s wellbeing (see In Context #50 for a description of this project’s beginnings). This year, we focused on grades 7-10, when students are forming their understanding of objective science through engaged observation and experimentation. We took up the phenomenon of water in its three states (vapor, liquid, solid), focusing on water’s relationship to warmth on the one hand and to pressure on the other.
Our two and half days together were full of experimentation, observations, conversation, and the forming of shared imaginations. As we worked with different phenomena involving moisture — for example noting the readings from “wet bulb” and “dry bulb” thermometers in different situations — we quickly realized that the entire environmental context needed to be considered in order to make sense of even simple observations. In this case, the wet bulb thermometer was created simply by wrapping a water-saturated paper towel around the bulb end of a spirit thermometer and allowing the paper towel to continuously wick up water from a tray below; this wet bulb thermometer always registered a lower temperature than the dry bulb thermometer. But when cool and moist air was blown by a fan over the two bulbs, the difference in temperatures between the wet and dry bulbs decreased. It was clearly not just the wet paper towel “causing” the lower temperature reading, but also the conditions of the air passing over the thermometers and the relative readings of the two thermometers together that needed to be considered. As we worked with increasingly complex experiments, we observed time and again that there was never a single cause that could be separated out, but rather a system of dynamical relationships that demanded consideration as a whole.
It is exactly this kind of thinking that is essential for addressing climate change. Rather than searching for the single answer that fixes the problem, how can we imagine the Earth as a living whole and act on behalf of her wellbeing? In a similar way, our conversations brought to light that climate change cannot be addressed with a single titular main lesson, shoehorned into already overfull schedules, but rather that this topic could easily serve as a unifying arc throughout each and every one of a school’s existing science main lessons in grades 7-10. Physics, chemistry, life science, earth science, and more can each serve as lenses that illuminate different aspects of the living, dynamical systems that we call climate. Colleagues were enthusiastic in their wish to continue this work. In the words of one participant, “It filled me with hope to be in the presence of other educators who are committed to bringing the pressing theme of climate change to students in a living and motivating way.”
Our next Climate Colloquium will be in February of 2026. We will take up a different constellation of phenomena for the 7th-10th grade range — particularly those that transform substances and thus fall under the umbrella of chemistry — and also think towards the 11th and 12th grade with the question of how these older students engage in meaningful initiatives towards the wellbeing of the Earth. We welcome interested colleagues to join us in this work!