However, even at the end of the course, 8% still thought climate change would not start to harm people until 51–100 years from now, and 2% thought it would take over 100 years. This pattern suggests instructors have opportunities to modify curricula in ways that leave students with a greater sense of empowerment and efficacy; we suggest questions that instructors can ask themselves in order to modify their courses with this goal in mind. Scribd will begin operating the SlideShare business on December 1, 2020 (b) Student responses in 2017 to the question: “How much do you think climate change will harm you personally?” The most common response at the beginning of the semester was “a moderate amount,” compared with “a great deal” at the end of the semester. By the end of the semester, 78% correctly identified that the scientific consensus is that climate change is mostly caused by humans, while only 12% incorrectly thought that humans and natural causes contribute equally to climate change, Student Likert‐scale responses (combined from 2017 and 2018 semesters) to the statements (a) “Scientists have a good understanding of whether climate change is occurring” and (b) “Scientists have a good understanding of why climate change is occurring.” Participants agreed that scientists understand whether and why climate change is occurring, and shifted to holding those views more strongly by the end of the semester (Note: Students who chose “I don't know” [1–6 students per semester‐question combination] are not plotted, which explains the slight differences in percentages between the results given in the text and on the figure; the numbers of student responses included in the plots are indicated on the figure), (a) Student responses in 2017 to the question: “When do you think climate change will start to harm people?” When asked at the beginning of the semester, only 33% of participants recognized that climate change is already harming people now, whereas at the end of the semester 66% recognized this. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. However, by the end of the semester, the most common response to this question was “a great deal” (41%). Readerly & Writerly Texts The Readerly Text. Students were also presented with information on the myriad ways that climate change impacts human health, including via more frequent extreme heat and ozone exceedance days, increased vector‐borne diseases, greater food insecurity, and more natural disasters (Patz, Frumkin, Holloway, Vimont, & Haines, 2014). The next most common response (37%) was that humans could reduce climate change, but were not willing to change their behavior—thus no meaningful action would be taken. Finally, we sought to understand what students thought about the potential to act to slow or stop climate change, and whether those thoughts changed after instruction. To begin understanding how content knowledge interacts with student constructions of climate change solutions, we administered and quantitatively analyzed a survey that examined student views of climate change and how they shifted with instruction during an undergraduate introductory biology course at a large Midwestern university. The more gaps there are in a text, the more work there is for the reader to do in constructing meaning. This question was not asked in 2018 (see Section, What can educators do if they want students to leave their courses with an increased understanding of the science of climate change, ACADEMIC PRACTICE IN ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION, I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of Use, AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science], What we know: The reality, risks, and response to climate change, The influence of instruction, prior knowledge, and values on climate change risk perception among undergraduates, Chronic environmental change: Emerging ‘psychoterratic’ syndromes, Climate change and human well‐being: Global challenges and opportunities, Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change, Climate change: A continuing threat to the health of the world's population, Longitudinal study of the impacts of a climate change curriculum on undergraduate student learning: Initial results, Fundamental climate literacy and the promise of the next generation science standards, Teaching and learning about climate change: A framework for educators, Commonsense conceptions of emergent processes: Why some misconceptions are robust, How do young people engage with climate change? Teachers' initial reading of GCSE texts or their initial confrontation with the ideas behind the new examination draws upon both those internalized rules which actors reproduce in their day to day working lives and those structural resources which position actors within set frameworks. If our participants' responses are any indication, students may be entering postsecondary education in the US with a higher confidence in the realities of climate change than existing surveys might lead us to expect. Readerly texts are most popular because they invite a narrow interpretation – the audience can easily uncover the text’s pre-determined meaning. The percentage of participants who reported that climate change was personally important to them increased from 60% to 80% after the climate change course module (Figure 7b, χ2 = 10.2, p = .001), and the percentage who thought climate change was an extremely important personal issue increased from 14% to 24%. After instruction, participants became more certain that climate change is happening, that humans are primarily responsible, and that there is a strong scientific consensus that climate change is happening and caused by people—findings broadly consistent with earlier studies (e.g., Holthuis et al., 2014). Over the course of the semester, participants became more worried about climate change (Figure 7a). An account is given of the way those structural and interactional influences impact upon initial textual readings within one of the case-study schools. Meghan A. Duffy, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Biological Sciences Building, 1105 North University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA. School of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA. For example, when viewing Die Hard, audiences expend very little effort to make sense out of the film; rather, they can enjoy its thin plot and action sequences as pure entertainment. Introductory science coursework can and should support these efforts; our climate future depends, in part, on the kind of climate literacy our pedagogy supports. Climate injustice: How should education respond? To help answer these questions, our study focused on students' constructions of climate change in an introductory biology course at a large Midwestern university in the US. A culture and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and traditions. Curriculum policy and curriculum practice within specific sites is always the result of contestation. Photograph credit: Martin Springborg, Student responses (combined from 2017 and 2018) to the question, “Do you think that climate change is happening?” when asked at the beginning (top row) and end (bottom row) of the semester. This cycle of activity at different moments and in different guises influences actual practice. Additional participant demographic data from both semesters are given in Table 1. It refers to those types of texts that encourage us to remain (and enjoy) being readers – that is, to find pleasure in devouring a well-crafted to story. Because some questions were given in both semesters but others only in 2017, the figures indicate the number of respondents; questions with approximately 380 respondents were those given in both semesters. However, considering that participants already accepted that climate change is happening when they entered the course, class time might be better devoted to more advanced or nuanced topics—topics that take the realities of climate change as their starting premise, and that build on, extend, and add meaningful complexity to student understandings. We argue that classroom instruction does a disservice to students if it deepens their knowledge about climate change but also leaves them feeling such despair and disempowerment that they are disinclined to try to make a difference. Johnson borrows The challenge confronting many instructors is this: How can we ensure that students leave our courses not only with an increased understanding of the science of climate change (including the potential severity of its impacts), but also with a sense of purpose and empowerment? Climate change can influence mental health, both as a result of climate‐related disasters and as a result of more gradual changes to climate (Trombley, Chalupka, & Anderko, 2017). The number who initially recognized that climate change is already harming people was surprisingly low, especially given these students' overall acceptance of climate change (see above). We suspect that few science educators would argue that ecology majors are the only population responsible for responding to the effects of climate change. Using a university‐designed online system, we invited students enrolled in this course to participate in surveys that asked them to describe their perceptions of climate change. Our study suggests that instructors should go beyond simply characterizing the causes and consequences of climate change. Instructors might be able to counter this potential negative consequence of instruction if they reimagine the classroom as a place where students not only gain knowledge about climate change and its impacts on different communities, but also gain knowledge about how to use that knowledge and leave feeling empowered to do so. The percentage of these students who were “extremely sure” that climate change is happening increased from 44% at the beginning of the semester to 70% at the end of the semester (χ2 = 56.2, p < .0001). In the first semester, the premodule survey invitation was sent mid‐semester and the postmodule survey invitation was sent near the end of the semester. Learn more. Today, on Columbus Day, the "text" that I am speaking of specifically is History. and displacements of meaning in a text, while humanism is a strategy to stop reading when the text stops saying what it ought to have said.-Barbara Johnson (2014, 347) The Barbara Johnson Reader aptly introduces Johnson’s writing with her meditation on the distinction between the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. Learning about climate change means more than learning about climate systems—it means also learning about active ways to equitably, productively, and sustainably intervene in those systems. Even if our courses impart a climate‐related “functional scientific literacy” (Zeidler & Newton, 2017) that “moves beyond retention of scientific fact” to contemplate the ethical stakes and social consequences of (not) acting on those facts (p. 60), such climate literacy may not amount to much if students also are too discouraged, disengaged, or overwhelmed to put it into practice. The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties. Data and code are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3334292. Putting it differently: Are our classrooms preparing students only for a “readerly” climate literacy, where they take in information about climate, without corresponding attention to more participatory “writerly” forms of climate literacy, where they feel prepared to take action in response to what they have learned? Similarly, when designing curricula and enacting pedagogy, it is important to remember that students are not merely “empty ‘mind[s]’ passively open to the reception of deposits” (Freire, 2018, p. 75). The instructors of the large lecture section, and some of the course lectures and discussion section materials, differed between the two semesters, but the climate change module was largely consistent, including having the same learning objectives. For example, an assignment might ask students to focus on identifying solutions for real world scenarios, such as by leading the World Climate Simulation, which has been shown to leave participants with greater feelings of urgency and hope and a greater desire to act in response to climate change (Rooney‐Varga et al.. As part of this pedagogical process, it is important to bear in mind that climate change is a complexly anthropogenic problem—driven, experienced, and responded to by humans. These questions were not asked in 2018 (see Section, (a) Student responses in 2017 and 2018 to the question: “How worried are you about climate change?” and (b) student responses in 2017 to the question: “How important is the issue of climate change to you personally?” Participants became significantly more worried about climate change by the end of the semester and reported that climate change was more personally important to them, Student responses in 2017 to the question: “Which of the following statements comes closest to your view?” Both at the beginning and end of the semester, participants were not confident that humans would reduce climate change. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article. and you may need to create a new Wiley Online Library account. If students come to our courses already accepting climate change is occurring, are we merely “preaching to the choir,” so to speak, when we have the opportunity to support students in composing new verses? Participants were predominately white (72% in 2017, 59% in 2018), women (78% in both semesters), first or second year undergraduates (83% in 2017, 80% in 2018), and from a household with an annual income above $100,000 (50% in 2017, 47% in 2018). Writing good research paper is quite easy and very difficult simultaneously. Participants also more accurately described the scientific consensus around the cause(s) of climate change after the course's climate change module. Readerly Text A text that makes no requirement of … The idea of “readerly” and “writerly” texts has stuck with me despite class ending hours ago. In particular, the instructors sought to highlight five points: (a) Climate change is happening now, (b) Climate change is largely caused by humans, (c) The best way to slow climate change is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, (d) Climate change is already altering species and ecosystems, and (e) Climate change affects human health. We hypothesize that the high level of worry expressed by our participants may result from them becoming more certain that climate change is happening and more aware of the immediacy of its impacts, while at the same time retaining pessimistic views about whether humans will actually act to reduce climate change. Our survey indicates that participants entered this course accepting that climate change is occurring, and that their understanding of and concern about climate change increased during the course. In both semesters, students received an invitation to take the survey before the course module on climate change and again after the course module was completed. Such books are termed writerly texts and can be an exciting challenge for young readers. Importantly, and perhaps counter‐intuitively, coursework that focuses too narrowly on readerly climate literacy may create new barriers to writerly climate action. In comparison, only 21% of Americans are “very worried” about climate change (Leiserowitz et al., 2018).

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