California’s Central Valley, a crucial agricultural hub for the entire world, is sinking — and young people living there are about to learn why. Soon, seventh graders across California will have access to a curricular unit that will help them understand how climate change is impacting the state and explore what can be done about it. This new unit is not a typical doom-and-gloom story of environmental disaster, however; it was designed by a group of young people from 19 countries across four continents for our California peers to learn about climate change, environmental justice, and what actions young people can take.
As college students (one from Minas Gerais, Brazil, the other from California), we were excited to be part of the global youth team designing this curriculum. Our generation has grown up knowing that our planet is suffering under the intense duress of climate change. Terms like “forest fire,” “sea level rise,” and “climate risk” have been familiar to us since we were very young. We are from different countries and cultures, yet we share a common concern about how to tackle our inherited climate crisis because it impacts us all.
Global Nomads Group, a nonprofit organization that connects youth across the world to collaboratively create curricular content on social issues, provided us the opportunity, training, and support to work with global peers on this youth-designed environmental justice curriculum. After being field-tested and reviewed by multiple educators in California, it will now be used in California schools.
As students of vastly different education systems around the world, we know how inaccessible education can be. Whether it's the language used or the focus on memorization and regurgitation, education is often designed for a perceived “average student,” shutting out students with disabilities, language barriers, and other learning interferences. Our curriculum is based on our own designers’ needs. We included translations, pictorial representations, and various ways to access the content and participate in the learning. Our training and experience show that designing for the margins makes the curriculum better for all.
Our unit starts with the problem of land sinking, also known as subsidence, in California’s Central Valley and is intended to build curiosity about the broader issues of water management. We learned about professional curriculum design tools used by publishing companies like backwards design, standards alignment, content research, expert reviews, universal design, and pilot testing.
We brought our own creative approach as young people to ensure our curriculum will be uniquely appealing to our generation. First, we wanted to gamify our curriculum, because we know how our generation likes to learn in unique ways. Instead of traditional lecture-style content, students meet different characters (that our more artistic team members designed) and pore over clues to puzzle out why the Central Valley is sinking. The learning is motivated by our natural curiosity and questioning. We designed from the heart, pushing ourselves to only put forward ideas and approaches that would interest our peers.
We designed the characters to represent a variety of relevant perspectives and backgrounds. We created Jolfy, a cyborg coyote from the future, to guide students through the unit. The others have careers in hydrogeology, climate science, farming, local politics, and history. For example, the historian prompts students to investigate historical documents that show the impacts of settler colonialism on California’s ecosystem and Indigenous peoples. Meanwhile, the hydrogeologist (someone who studies underground water) guides students to model how aquifers work and what happens when groundwater supplies are depleted.
We want students to relate to the identities and perspectives they are familiar with while empathizing with and understanding the ones they are not. We live in an interconnected world, where any problem that impacts some of us will eventually affect all of us.
Our curriculum doesn’t just focus on the consequences of climate change; a major part of it addresses how communities are responding with promising and pragmatic actions. In exploring such a depressing and anxiety-provoking topic, providing a sense of hope and ways to move forward is crucial. We designed the curriculum so that students not only learn about the problem but also formulate and execute their own solutions in their local communities. Our generation needs to learn about the past while working toward and dreaming about a better future.
This last part is crucial. Our generation needs hope. We need our educators and parents to have hope. We need the world to have hope. We know that climate change is a problem that our generation will have to deal with. In fact, we are dealing with it now! We need all young people to have a solid climate education, not just about the problems we have inherited but also the approaches to minimize consequences of climate policies and behaviors that have not protected us. Just as we collaborated on this curriculum with our global peers, benefiting from our vast differences in perspectives and experiences, we need all generations to work together to guarantee our collective tomorrow.
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