‘Moral imperative’: Teachers say more climate change lessons needed in classrooms

Violette Baillargeon stands with a group of high school students attending a climate rally in Metro Vancouver, in this undated handout photo. THE CANADIAN PRESS / Handout - Violette Baillargeon (Mandatory Credit)

As climate change becomes more evident in Canadians’ daily lives, teachers across the country say the education system must better equip younger generations to deal with its fallout.

Students will be returning to classrooms after one of Canada’s worst wildfire seasons on record destroyed homes, forced thousands of people to flee their communities and left many more across the country breathing in hazy wildfire smoke.

Lisa Jeffery, a high-school science teacher in Leamington, Ont., says there’s been a noticeable shift among her students’ attitudes toward climate change in the last decade.

“It’s not looking terribly optimistic when our country is on fire most summers as it is right now,” she said in a recent interview while one of several air quality warnings was in effect for southern Ontario.

As part of Ontario’s science curriculum, Jeffery says teachers are supposed to spend about a quarter of the semester on climate change and environmental education, but there’s usually room for more climate discussions outside of curriculum units where the environment is the immediate focus, such as ecology.

“(Climate change education) extends to every single subject in our curriculum,” Jeffery said, adding that she feels there are “lost opportunities” to foster more climate change discussions in other subjects.

A survey by Learning for a Sustainable Future earlier this year found that 62 per cent of Canadians think climate change is a pressing issue that should be a high priority in schools. The survey of 4,228 people included more than 600 teachers, many of whom said they face barriers to teaching about climate change. Two-thirds of teachers noted a lack of time and 60 per cent felt they need more professional development.

Rochelle Tkach, a Grade 7 and 8 teacher in Ontario’s Niagara region, said she has adopted a more interdisciplinary approach, teaching her students about climate change and its impact on their community through a food market project.

Her class looked at how the need to travel by car to access affordable produce in their area contributed to CO2 emissions. Students also calculated the estimated carbon emissions from that produce’s transportation to the market.

“There were some really interesting light bulb moments for students, looking at how locally sourced produce can actually combat some of those issues with CO2 emissions,” she said.

Tkach said “one or two” other teachers at her school board also teach these types of lessons, an approach that she said can be overwhelming for educators.

“It looks really overwhelming and really messy because our curriculum is designed in silos. We have science class, language class, social studies or geography and we’re still very regimented and very trained to think about subjects that way,” Tkach said.

Breaking out of those silos is key to helping students find connections between climate issues more easily, she said.

Ontario’s Education Ministry said the provincial curriculum already offers opportunities to learn about environmental issues and climate change, including several recent revisions to science and geography courses.

In Alberta, which experienced some of Canada’s most devastating wildfires in recent years, teachers also want to see curriculum changes that allow them to offer more lessons on climate change, the president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association said.

But Jason Schilling said he’s worried the politicization of climate change in the province could remove teachers’ voices from the curriculum design process entirely. He recalled the education minister in 2019 questioning why the climate impact of the province’s oil and gas industry was included as a question on a test.

“Having politicians stand up and make comments about the curriculum just makes things much worse if people get riled up with that sort of stuff,” Schilling said. “We just need to depoliticize that stuff and be able to have students explore topics and come to their own conclusions based on science.”

He said the school curriculum should reflect students’ curiosity about climate change, like other aspects of the world they live in.

Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said the province’s curriculum offers “many opportunities to examine the subject of climate change from multiple perspectives,” including in science, career and technology courses.

“The K to 12 science curriculum empowers students to address increasingly challenging concepts as they progress through their studies -- from environmental stewardship to weather patterns, ecosystems and biomes, right through to fossil fuels and energy efficiency,” Nicolaides wrote in a statement.

He added the curriculum ensures students “will receive a balanced education that highlights the importance of Alberta’s natural resources as a key economic driver and our shared responsibility for environmental stewardship and sustainability.”

Violette Baillargeon, a French and Spanish high school teacher in Surrey, B.C., also stressed that teaching about climate change isn’t political; it’s necessary to equip students with tools to navigate their future.

“We have a moral imperative to talk about the responsibility we have toward the planet and towards one another,” she said.

Baillargeon said it’s common for her students to return to school in September talking about wildfires, flooding and extreme heat events -- all of which have dramatic effects on them.

“Talking about climate is talking about what a consensus of scientists have agreed is happening currently and continuing to happen at an accelerating rate,” she said. “Teachers want to equip students with the knowledge and the critical thinking skills to understand climate change.”

Baillargeon, who sits on an environmental justice committee in her local teachers association, said she was inspired to foster more climate change discussions in her classes after a trip to Mexico in 2018 when she encountered a group of migrants fleeing from drought-ridden countries in Central America.

The group included two teenage siblings, the same age as Baillargeon’s students and her own children, who had walked to Mexico from Honduras to escape what she described as social unrest caused by the climate emergency.

“We can’t talk about the language without talking about the culture, and we can’t talk about the culture without talking about the inequities present in the global south and how those are tied to the climate emergency,” Baillargeon said.

Cassidy McMackon, The Canadian Press