Climate Change and Regional Geography
Climate change can bring an immediate and pressing relevance to geography study, coaxing new ideas out of worn textbooks
Students take to the streets to raise awareness of climate change on Alternative Transportation Day. by Talia Epstein R
ARELY TODAY DO WE open the newspaper or watch the news without coming across a mention of climate change. Predictions are that in the near
future the warming of our planet will be one of the biggest political and social issues we will face. Students need to understand the science behind climate
change as well as the effects it may have on their local area and their country. One way to incorporate this complex topic into our curricula is to pair climate change with the regional and national geography studies that students traditionally undertake in upper elementary school. Last year, as a teach- ing fellow in a sixth grade classroom, I was asked by my cooperating teacher to revamp what she saw as a stale and outdated geography curriculum. I decided to match climate change to the regional geography curriculum, thereby creating a more relevant and multidisciplinary unit to help
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students understand what climate change might look like in various regions of the United States. In the end, our students were not only better geographers and climate scientists; they were also motivated to take action on climate change issues. One of the best ways to engage older elementary
children in an issue is by giving them responsibility for its outcome. Imagine as a fourth, fifth or sixth grader being told that you are to become an active player in climate change issues, when normally you don’t even have a say about your bedtime! In our class, this was the essential hook for gaining students’ interest. On the first day of the unit, a very official looking letter arrived from the fictitious offices of the U.S. Department of the International Panel on Climate Change. This letter explained that the students’ help was needed in a study on the future impact of climate change on different regions of the United States. The stu- dents were asked to become experts on the regions, learn about the climate-change predictions, and create theories
GREEN TEACHER 83
Photographs: Talia Epstein
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