For the last installment of a three-part series on climate change, we feature Brett Levy, an assistant professor of educational theory and practice in UAlbany's School of Education, and Casey Meehan, the sustainability coordinator for Western Technical College in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Levy and Meehan have researched how textbooks frame the issue of climate change, and the extent to which they prepare today's youth for civic participation.
For the last installment of a three-part series on climate change, we feature Brett Levy, an assistant professor of educational theory and practice in UAlbany's School of Education, and Casey Meehan, the sustainability coordinator for Western Technical College in La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Levy and Meehan have researched how textbooks frame the issue of climate change, and the extent to which they prepare today's youth for civic participation.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll. Today we mark our last installment of a three-part series on climate change. We've spoken to a political scientist on the approaches policymakers take when addressing the issue, as well as a climate scientist and his research on the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru. We're closing the series by focusing on the educational perspective. I have with me Brett Levy, an assistant professor of educational theory and practice in UAlbany's School of Education and by phone, Casey Meehan, sustainability coordinator for Western Technical College in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Brett and Casey have researched how textbooks frame the issue of climate change and the extent to which they prepare today's youth for civic participation.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Casey, thank you for joining us today.
Casey Meehan:
Glad to be here.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Casey, you work in sustainability for Western and Brett, you study educational theory and practice. What was the research question that brought you two together to do the study?
Brett Levy:
Casey, since you started it, why don't you talk about what inspired you?
Casey Meehan:
Sure. It actually started as a question about controversial issues in the classroom and how teachers and schools present the idea of publicly controversial issues, and just got really interested in the idea of climate change and how does this actually play out in a social studies classroom. But then I also, with the topic itself it lends itself really nicely to science classrooms as well. So then the question also became, well, are there differences in between how social studies teachers and curricula and science teachers and curricula present this issue?
Sarah O'Carroll:
That's really interesting. Now what led you to Brett Levy at the School of Education?
Casey Meehan:
Well, so at the time I was doing the study, Brett was at UW Madison as a visiting professor there. I mean we had an office right across the lobby from each other and it just sort of formed that way.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Well, it's neat to see that you've built upon this research and still continuing. Now, what curricular materials specifically did you choose to analyze, and how did you go about selecting them?
Casey Meehan:
Originally wanted to look at widely-used textbooks in both social studies and science classrooms. So I contacted some firms that look at the popularity of different textbooks and got a list of the most used or most purchased, I should say, textbooks in different areas of social studies and different areas of science. So that's how we selected those books. And then knowing that teachers also make use of supplemental curricula, that's curriculum that is produced usually from a curriculum workshop somehow or a think tank or an advocacy group. Knowing that teachers also take advantage of those and use those in their classrooms, I also wanted to get a sense of what some of those materials were saying. So we found eight sets of supplemental materials that some were geared specifically to social studies classrooms. Most of them were geared pretty generally that could be used in social studies or science or some other type of hybrid class. Again, just getting a sense of what all that curriculum is saying.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now, going back to the timeframe, I saw in reading your research that you chose 2007 as the start of your timeline. Why 2007, and then why a five-year timeline?
Casey Meehan:
The 2007 date, we really wanted to choose materials that were published subsequent to the 2007 IPCC report that stated that humans are causing climate change and there's really ... with high confidence I think was this statement, so really with very little uncertainty that humans were causing this. We wanted the materials in this study to, the people that were writing those, to at least have access to that report, so at least it came out.
Casey Meehan:
Okay. Now Brett, can you tell us about the big takeaways from the research, and perhaps what surprised you in doing the work?
Brett Levy:
Great question. There are three sets of takeaways I would say, and they fit into three categories, which is how we organized the article. One set of findings is about how the causes of climate change are portrayed. The second set of findings is about how the impacts of climate change are portrayed, and the third set of finding is about how potential responses to climate change are portrayed. For the first set of findings related to the causes of climate change, we grouped them into three categories. The three categories are adherent, meaning adherent to what the climate science is saying predominantly, especially in the IPCC report, that is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There were nine curricula that were adherent to that perspective. Four of the five science textbooks fit into the hesitant category. And then there were two that were dissenting and that really questioned the predominant view of scientists in 2007. So that was the first set of findings. There were a large number of curricula that are very popular used in science classrooms, some used in social studies classrooms, that are more hesitant to adopt the emerging scientific consensus.
Brett Levy:
The second set of findings was about impacts and vulnerabilities and how are these portrayed. We found that the impacts of climate change in many of these textbooks are portrayed as distant or uncertain in terms of their temporal and geographic characteristics. So how soon will coastal flooding occur? How soon will forest fires become an issue? In many textbooks it was a bit vague. And then in terms of the geographic dimension, some of the textbooks, many of the textbooks referred to distant lands, not lands right here on the mainland US.
Sarah O'Carroll:
The idea is if it's so far away then I don't need to adapt in my daily life and that my personal carbon footprint isn't all that big. This seems like that would be the idea that a reader would get from this.
Brett Levy:
The implication is that it's not necessarily relevant to your life. It is relevant to people in Alaska, to people in Canada, to people in Western Siberia as opposed to what could happen right here for students in our lives. We're seeing a lot of some of these trends emerge unfortunately.
Brett Levy:
The third set is about potential responses and the potential responses, I'll let Casey talk About this a bit.
Casey Meehan:
Sure. I think what's interesting about those first two sets of findings is that it really portrayed the openness about global climate change in the sense that there's a lot of uncertain questions or answers, but we're not really sure what's happening there. What we found with the responses and how these curricular materials were helping students think through the responses is it was much more closed. They offered a very particular set of responses that students should do. And really what's interesting about that is that's the legitimately open question. You want students to be thinking about a really wide range of responses. That's legitimately open and very valid for people to be talking about, especially in a social studies classroom, but instead these materials really honed in on a particular set of responses.
Casey Meehan:
That was what we looked at is one type of big category of response would be mitigation, another would be adaptation, and then the third would be geoengineering. So these are three big types of responses that get bandied about in the climate change community quite a bit. What we found is that virtually all the discussion around responses focused on mitigation, very, very little, if any, on adaptation, and really nothing on geoengineering. We weren't taking a stance on what is appropriate and what isn't as far as responses, but more just noting that there's a limit to the types of responses students are being asked to consider. What we found is that there was a difference between the social studies materials and the science materials when they talked about how students should think about this.
Casey Meehan:
So social studies materials really looked at mitigation via government regulation and laws. They brought up lots of ways that governments could step in and do something about this. On the non-social studies side of things, it was really much more about individual actions.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Like turning the lights off or-
Casey Meehan:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Really, those were often portrayed as these easy things you could do. I mean there's a couple of different sources even used language really similar to that like, "Here are 10 easy things you can do to limit climate change." What it implied is it is not only easy, but these things are going to be sufficient. And if you do this, then we're all just going to be fine.
Sarah O'Carroll:
That if you just have to do this small thing, then the gravity can't be so severe.
Casey Meehan:
Right. Right. If you look at that and in tandem with the messages that were being sent about where climate change is happening and when it's going to happen, the whole package really makes it sound like this isn't really that big of an issue. Another interesting thing with the mitigation is that there was very little attention on the private sector's responsibility to do something. Really this was when we talk about the question of who owns the response to climate change, the answer in the curricula seemed pretty clear. It was either the government needs to be responsible for this or individuals.
Sarah O'Carroll:
The cynic in me, as you're saying this, it sounds like that might have something to do with how textbooks are approved?
Casey Meehan:
I don't know if I have the ability to answer that really. One of the limitations of the study is that we didn't interview the people that are writing these books, so I'm not sure why they made the decisions that they did. So I can't say that something was influencing them one way or the other. I have a suspicion that, yes, it does have to do with the way textbooks are approved, especially by larger states. But again, I don't have, there's no evidence that I have that that's the case. Brett, what do you think?
Brett Levy:
Some of the material that we reviewed did really reflect the scientific consensus about climate change being caused by humans, and they did a good job of that. And then others that were hesitant, we need to consider the fact that there may be delays in their ability to review the scientific literature and reflect that in what they publish. At the same time, we need to be aware of what students are seeing and how these materials might be affecting their perspectives.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Casey, would you have any other guidance for high school administrators or the other constituents that Brett was speaking to about what they should be looking for in textbooks in terms of education on climate change?
Casey Meehan:
I think it's really incumbent on educators to make sure that the information that we're presenting to students in the classroom reflects what the scientific realities are, otherwise I would say we're being educationally irresponsible otherwise. Science classrooms are supposed to be teaching science. This is what we know about climate change now with these given reports that we've been talking about. That reflects the best information we have about science. So to not teach that or to teach that as if it's just an an opinion is educationally irresponsible.
Casey Meehan:
Now, if you do want to teach about the controversy, I think that's super fascinating as well, but a science classroom maybe isn't the right place for that. Maybe that's where social studies jumps in and looks at not the fact that, not opening it up that this is a controversy amongst scientists, but why is this a controversy among the public? I think that's a really interesting question for students to think about. So just I think being really careful, educators and administrators as they're choosing books and thinking through their curriculum about what exactly are they presenting as an open question versus a closed question and thinking about what that means then for the messages that students get.
Brett Levy:
Another major implication is that educators of science courses and educators of social studies courses may find it valuable to do collaborative teaching or units on issues that bleed into both subject areas. It could be that if we do, as educators, see a role for collective action as we generally do, I mean we do require a civics courses for many, many students, then it could be that a unit on climate change is a collaborative effort among science educators and social studies educators. That's one of the implications for our work as well.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now, do you plan on taking this research further? Or, Casey, is there anything that's coming next for this research?
Casey Meehan:
I mean we've definitely talked about it. There's nothing concrete yet, but I think it would be fascinating to do a version two of this and see what textbooks are now saying about global climate change. I think that this is an area that's ripe for more research.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Well, thank you Casey. Do either of you, Brett or Casey, have any final thoughts?
Brett Levy:
I have one framing thought, which is that curricular materials can be very important and can influence what young people learn about. Most teachers are very skilled and they look at curricula and they can critically assess them. They're one piece of what happens in a classroom. They're not the entirety of what happens in a classroom. But textbooks and curricular materials can play a very important role. So we should pay attention to what they say.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Absolutely. Casey?
Casey Meehan:
No. Just thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about our research.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Well, thank you for joining and thank you, Brett, as well. It was great to hear about the research you have and hopefully the research that will continue.
Brett Levy:
Thank you for your interest in this topic.
Casey Meehan:
Yeah. Thank you.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah O'Carroll. That was Brett Levy, an assistant professor in the School of Education. We also had Casey Meehan, the sustainability coordinator at Western technical college, calling in from La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Sarah O'Carroll:
This was the last episode of a three-part series on climate change. We featured a policy perspective from Rockefeller College's Brian Greenhill, as well as a case study on Peru's Quelccaya Ice Cap led by climate scientist, Matthias Duwe. You can let us know what you thought of the series by emailing us at mediarelations@albany.edu. And you can find us on Twitter at UAlbany News.