About four years ago, Holly Bailey-Hofmann’s English 101 class at West Los Angeles College got a complete makeover. She’d signed up to be part of a pilot program for professors interested in infusing their curriculum with lessons about climate change and community resilience. The program only required her to “climatize” one module of the syllabus, but she loved the work so much she overhauled the whole class.
The goal for her students remained the same pre- and post-makeover: learning to write effectively and conduct academic research. Now, though, she teaches reading, writing and research by assigning research studies and nonfiction essays about climate change — including pieces about how social norms are often a barrier to addressing climate change, how climate change affects mental health, and how abnormally hot days could affect cognitive skills. She’s found her students love it.
“We just want to do right by our students. We want to give them the climate literacy they’re going to need later in their lives,” Bailey-Hofmann said.
The pilot program was run by WLAC’s California Center for Climate Change Education, which was established by the state legislature in 2022 to promote climate change education and infuse sustainability practices at nine Los Angeles-area colleges. Each year since then, roughly 15 WLAC professors have received a stipend from the center to study how climate change intersects with their field and redesign at least a portion of one class to reflect that. The program has since expanded to professors from the other eight colleges.
The professors span disciplines including art, communication studies, biology, film production, chemistry, paralegal studies and child development, among others. Jo Tavares, director of the California Center for Climate Change Education, said that in the next few years, she hopes to create a virtual library that faculty statewide could draw on to understand how climate intersects with what they’re teaching, and update their courses.
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Across the country, college leaders are trying to figure out how to best prepare their students for the consequences of climate change. Experts say all careers will in some way intersect with climate change, and that in order to be prepared for the job market, students need a basic understanding of climate science and its social implications. But, as I wrote in my story about the University of California San Diego’s new climate change course requirement, colleges are not necessarily saying that every student should sign up for Climate Change 101.
UCSD, for example, identified what courses already have at least 30 percent climate change-related material, and now requires that students take at least one of those in order to graduate. Other institutions are also taking the required classes route: Arizona State University requires students to take a sustainability-related course, and San Francisco State University requires a climate justice course.
Bailey-Hofmann is now part of the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Climate Fellows Program, a group of professors from across the state tasked with various climate and sustainability initiatives. Through the program, she’s researching opportunities to introduce climate change education at each of the state’s 116 community colleges, along with how to make it easier for students to transfer to four-year institutions with climate- or environment-focused degrees. She said many professors she’s talked to who haven’t introduced climate content told her, “Of course I would do it if I had the time.”
Related: Climate change ‘is the new liberal arts’: Colleges build environmental lessons into degrees
Bailey-Hofmann says it’s worth the effort. To climatize her curriculum, she first acquainted herself with climate science, then read articles and books on many aspects of climate change. She condensed what she’d learned into a 16-week English course, by designing modules with texts focused on how climate change relates to politics, religion, health and grief, among other topics. Some of the readings come from Bending the Curve, an open-access textbook focused on 10 solutions that could reduce the effects of climate change. Other assignments come from stand-alone texts focused on how climate change affects agriculture, why shrinking glaciers matter, and a New York Times article about how climate change affects Native Americans.
Another program participant, Los Angeles Harbor College professor Felipe E. Agredano, infused climate into his Chicano studies class by sharing examples from history of how Latinos and specifically Chicanos are connected to the land and have tried to preserve it. He talks about how the Aztecs used trees to create rectangular floating islands for farming, called chinampas, from which present-day hydroponics developed. Students also learn about Chicano farmworkers in the 1960s who fought against pesticides and what he calls “Chicana Latina verde” — the role women have played in environmental preservation and care throughout history.
San Diego City College art professor Terri Hughes-Oelrich, while not part of a particular program, said she’s been working to climatize her curriculum for years. She encourages her students to experiment with more climate-friendly materials, like bio clay instead of polymer clay (which is a type of plastic), making paint from natural pigments, and collecting items or waste from their everyday lives to use for sculptures.
She’s also updated her curriculum to encourage students to think about climate change and biodiversity loss: For example, she asks introductory ceramics students to research an endangered animal native to a place where they have ancestors, sculpt an adapted version of that animal that could have a better chance at survival, and present their case to the class.
Related: ‘Education is the climate solution’
After climatizing her English 101 class, Bailey-Hofmann went on to climatize her English 102 class, a literature course. She replaced the previous required readings with climate-related fiction, or “cli-fi,” including a traditional Navajo chant, essays, poetry and novels. Some of the texts she assigned fall under the “solar punk” umbrella, a utopian genre that imagines the potential for a better world. And for English 103, a class traditionally focused on critical thinking and composing written arguments, she swapped the classic readings for nonfiction works related to climate and environmentalism.
It’s hard to gauge demand for her climatized courses because she doesn’t have access to enrollment data and students are not always aware that they are signing up for a climate-focused class, Bailey-Hofmann said. But she said the high level of student engagement in class discussion and the positive feedback she receives from students suggest the class is resonating. While it may seem like the class’s intensive focus on climate change narrows the scope of the course and readings, Bailey-Hofmann said professors are free to focus their classes around any topic, and students see the wide-ranging implications of climate change all around them.
“Things are getting hotter here in the Southwest, things are getting drier,” Bailey-Hofmann said. “They need to have a certain level of literacy just to be able to talk about what’s happening to them. But further, they’re also going to need things like flexible thinking, ability to adapt, because a lot of the green jobs that are going to exist don’t exist yet.”
Contact staff writer Olivia Sanchez at 212-678-8402 or osanchez@hechingerreport.org.
This story about how to climatize curricula was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.
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