Assignment: ‘How Will Climate Change Affect My Career?’

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2024

Publication Title

The Existential Toolkit For Climate Justice Educators: How To Teach In A Burning World

Abstract

To encourage our students to reflect on the impact of climate change on their future careers, and then to manage their resulting sober and conflicted emotions, we have created an assignment we call “How Will Climate Change Impact My Career?” We teach two courses: Dr. Jeffrey Johansen and Dr. Ruth Jacob teach an introductory-level course in Biology on the science of climate change, and Dr. Debra J. Rosenthal teaches an introductory literature course on climate-change fiction (cli-fi). These Biology and English courses are linked together; students must co-enroll in both three-credit courses. Through our linked pair of courses, students engage in a six-hour-a-week interdisciplinary immersion into the actual mechanisms of global climate change in the United States and how American poets and fiction writers portray climate catastrophe in their writing. We hope the assignment makes students aware of the implications of climate change locally as well as globally.

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