Climate Stories Project Workshops
For access to a library of Climate Stories Project workshop documents such as lesson plans, information forms, and helpful tips, please contact us.
A short video introducing a Climate Stories Project education workshop at Common Ground School in New Haven, CT.
What is a Climate Stories Project Workshop?
Although we hear about climate change everywhere—on the news, in feature films, in school textbooks—many of us do not have an opportunity to have conversations about climate change. Furthermore, many of us associate climate change either with dense scientific reports or partisan-charged political battles, and, unsurprisingly, don’t want to engage with it at all. Thus, it can be difficult to see the connection between this abstract, contentious issue and our day-to-day activities, attitudes, and experiences. Yet talking about climate change and connecting it to everyday life are critical first steps in collectively working towards building a more just and sustainable world.
In a Climate Stories Project workshop, you will take these steps and harness the power of storytelling to engage with climate change.
Specifically, you will:
- Discover how climate change has been impacting your own community and communities around the world.
- Have meaningful conversations about these impacts.
- Put human faces to the abstractness of climate change.
- Connect the science of climate change to the stories of people out in the world.
The central goal of CSP is to get people talking and listening—to each other, to members of their own communities, and to other students around the world who are on the frontlines of climate change. CSP is an active, collaborative, people-centered, and transformational framework for learning about climate change.
CSP Education Workshops:
CSP has been incorporated successfully in both secondary and higher education classrooms. Students learn about local impacts of climate change, speak about their own responses to the changing climate, and conduct interviews with elders and others about climate change. Students can share their interviews on the CSP archive of climate stories and can use recorded interviews to create and and share projects such as podcasts, documentary film, or art projects.
Here are several activities which can be part of a Climate Stories Project workshop at your school:
- Students write and share about their personal observations of and responses to climate change, and how they are getting involved in climate advocacy.
- Students discuss how climate science intersects with their personal observation and experience.
- Students interview guest speakers, such as Indigenous elders and natural resources professionals about their responses to the climate crisis.
- Students listen to performance of a music piece featuring recorded climate stories and create their own artistic works featuring climate stories.
Here are some examples of CSP education workshops that have been carried out:
- Students in a Public Heath class at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, planned and conducted interviews about local climate change impacts and how they impact public heath at the community level.
- Students at Common Ground Charter School in New Haven, Connecticut interviewed, via Skype, Inuit students at Shishmaref, Alaska high school about climate impacts there.
- Students at the Adirondack Youth Climate Summit did reflective writing about their emotional responses to climate change and discussed these with each other.
- Students at the Chewonki School in coastal Maine discussed the link between climate science and climate stories and interviewed local and remote residents about their responses to the climate crisis.
- Students at Paul Smith's College interviewed residents of the Adirondacks and made a short documentary film about climate change in the region.
In all of these workshops, students came away with a deeper engagement with climate change as a vital human issue and were better able to understand their own relationship to the changing climate in their home regions.
Interested? Contact us to set up a workshop today!
For access to a library of Climate Stories Project workshop documents such as lesson plans, information forms, and helpful tips, please contact us.
Paul Smith's College Environmental Studies Professor Bethany Garretson speaks about Adirondack Climate Stories, for which her students interviewed community members in the Adirondacks and created a short documentary film using the interviews.
Learning outcomes:
Climate Stories Project is easily adaptable to many existing climate change or environmentally related curricula, course goals, and learning outcomes. Here are some of the specific learning outcomes that we have identified after incorporating CSP into our own classes. After participating in the Climate Stories Project, students will be able to:
Climate Stories Project is easily adaptable to many existing climate change or environmentally related curricula, course goals, and learning outcomes. Here are some of the specific learning outcomes that we have identified after incorporating CSP into our own classes. After participating in the Climate Stories Project, students will be able to:
- Explain how climate change is currently impacting their own communities as well as other communities around the world.
- Practice interview and audio editing skills.
- Design and create their own projects or presentations to share stories of climate change with wider audiences.
- Identify the various emotions that people feel in connection with climate change (hope, despair, sadness, etc).
- Evaluate the benefits of using personal stories for climate change communication and understanding.
- Reflect on their own relationship to climate change and consider steps that they can take in their own lives to address climate change.
Students in Shishmaref, Alaska speak with elders about climate change.