This Will Change Everything: Teaching the Climate Crisis

Authors

John Foran
Summer Gray
Corrie Grosse, College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's UniversityFollow
Theo LeQuesne

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2018

Disciplines

Climate | Curriculum and Social Inquiry | Environmental Studies | Higher Education | Higher Education and Teaching | Sociology

Abstract

We argue that U.S. sociologists have been woefully remiss in incorporating the climate crisis into our research agendas and even more, into our teaching. After laying out the gravity of the situation we issue a call for sociologists to consider whether they wish to continue this striking denial of responsibility to our students and to knowledge production. We then present four ways that we have infused our understanding of climate change, climate crisis, and climate justice into courses on global issues, social movements, inequality, and much more. We believe that “climate justice” – the key concept that drives our concern as scholar-activists working closely with undergraduate students – allows for a proper sociological emphasis on structured inequality and relational/intersectional thinking. The essay also points interested readers to resources that we have created, and invites them to contribute to a new project on writing case studies for teaching the climate crisis.

Copyright Statement

Copyright © 2019 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. This is a peer-reviewed, pre-copyedited version. The final published version can be found at https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/trajincschped.28.2.0126

Recommended Citation

Foran J, Gray S, Grosse C, LeQuesne T. 2018. This will change everything: teaching the climate crisis. Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy 28(2): 126-147. https://doi.org/10.5325/trajincschped.28.2.0126