All Jobs Are Climate Jobs: Earth Day Reflections for Educators

By Helena Prins, advisor, Learning + Teaching, BCcampus

Walk through an elementary school in April and you’ll likely see bright spring artwork and Earth Day posters lining the walls. Many schools mark the occasion with recycling drives or tree-planting ceremonies. In contrast, walk through the halls of a post-secondary institution and you’re more likely to overhear words like eco-anxiety, eco-paralysis, and eco-grief; terms that reflect the emotional toll of our climate reality.

Reframing the Role of Educators

Karen Costa, a faculty development facilitator who specializes in online pedagogy and trauma awareness, claims, “All jobs are climate jobs, and all courses are climate courses.” Have you considered your job as leader and educator in post-secondary education as a climate role? Have you integrated conversations about the environment into your business, psychology, communications, or science course?

Costa created a climate action pedagogy (CAP) model that rests on three pillars:

Accessibility: we should design with accessibility in mind from the beginning, not as an afterthought.
Emergent strategy: Small is all. Based on adrienne maree brown’s work and book, Emergent Strategy, this principle amplifies the power of incremental action. When we feel overwhelmed, we can focus on taking the next small step in climate action.
Learning experience design (LXD): Grounded in empathy, LXD considers “Who am I? What do I want? What do I need?” Caring for ourselves and each other as educators helps us care for our students too.

Place-Based and Indigenous Ways of Knowing

While the idea that all jobs are climate jobs may seem new, it is deeply rooted in long-standing Indigenous perspectives.

The First Peoples Principles of Learning state that “Learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors.” Education is tied to place and cannot be separate from it. As Jo Chrona reminds us, “The relationship to land and place is deeply rooted in Indigenous cultural perspectives; living and learning are intricately connected to sense of place and to the land itself.” (p. 123). It is essential for educators and students alike to understand that the health of human beings is tied to the health of the land.

What Climate-Kind Pedagogy Looks Like

David Orr already wrote about this climate responsibility in 1991 in his essay What is Education For? where he suggested that all education is environmental education. He called for “faculty and administrators who provide role models of integrity, care, thoughtfulness, and institutions that are capable of embodying ideals wholly and completely in all of their operations.” (Orr, 1991).

Dr. Kshamta Hunter, manager of transformative learning and student engagement at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Sustainability Hub, considers Orr’s paper essential reading. She explains:

Dr. Orr problematizes education and its purpose and challenges us to reimagine a values-based education that centers the environment and consciousness. As educators, we need to disrupt the education system that has proliferated the contemporary challenges associated with the poly-crisis and nurture more nature-centered and humanistic educational approaches.

According to Dr. Hunter, climate change and its social impacts have necessitated a rethink of traditional pedagogies. Educators are now faced with the challenge of engaging learners in climate conversations while supporting the range of emotions and pedagogical complexities that come with socio-scientific realities. Climate-kind pedagogy (CKP) cultivates climate- and justice-informed approaches and promotes kindness in educational settings. The framework addresses values reflected in course design, teaching attitudes, activities, tools, evaluations, and learning outcomes. CKP is grounded in a commitment to confronting oppressive practices, supporting students from all cultural backgrounds, and honouring lived experiences and cultural knowledge. UBC has launched a toolkit to help educators address climate anxiety.

Small Steps, Big Ripples

If we accept that our roles as leaders and educators are climate roles, where might we begin?

Costa recommends focusing on where we have power. Sharing resources, holding space for these important conversations, and participating in nature walks, clean-up events, or tree plantings ceremonies are all things we could do. We don’t have to do any of this alone. We can invite students to co-design solutions with us.

The BCcampus Open Collection includes a toolkit for exploring mental health and climate change. It empowers students to think critically about structural inequities and challenges the assumption that they lack the capacity to respond to socio-political issues that affect them.

In closing, I share this lovely invitation from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass:

People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always, “Plant a garden.” It’s good for the health of the earth, and it’s good for the health of people. A garden is a nursery for nurturing connection, the soil for cultivation of practical reverence. And its power goes far beyond the garden gate – once you develop a relationship with a little patch of earth, it becomes a seed itself. Something essential happens in a vegetable garden. It’s a place where if you can’t say “I love you” out loud, you can say it in seeds. And the land will reciprocate, in beans. (Kimmerer, 2015)

Whether or not you have the space to plant a garden, Earth Day is a reminder that we all have a role to play. What is one small, intentional action you can take today that could ripple outward in your classroom or campus?

Start by exploring one of the resources below. It might just plant the seed.