Five years ago, I launched a platform for climate literacy, a hybrid structure intended to hold up collaborative initiatives intended to transform how climate change is taught. I called it My Climate Story, and it is in fact grounded in my personal climate story. It’s a journey I’m still on; it started in a belated, arguably benighted, recognition that I needed new eyes and new words to apprehend how the landscape was transforming around my family’s home. The shoreline spruce trees were graying and dying too fast, undone by saltwater intruding on their ground. The word for that I learned is “rampike.”
What other new words and concepts would we need to describe and apprehend places transforming nearly in real time? The recognition that climate story was changing my life had emotional dimensions of course. Should we try to sell this place brimming with family memories? Should we try to elevate the house and save it for our kids? Would our coastline community really be viable when the kids are my age now? It’s a story I had a hard time telling without my throat tightening uncomfortably. But perhaps, my educator brain wondered, I could assist others to find the words to explore their own climate stories. In workshops and in classrooms, we could help make terms with local climate impacts–and learn to respond: to counteract, to ameliorate, to mitigate, to withstand, to organize. My educator brain wanted to find ways to transform climate education, recognizing it not only as a matter for science, but also as a matter of personal and community concern–and a matter for general education across the arts and sciences.
Students and colleagues began to gather around the platform to build out its collaborative structures—co-designing workshops, building storytelling booths and a “Story Bank,” writing and designing a workbook, writing and producing a documentary, etc. We began offering climate storytelling workshops on campus, in schools, online and in person.. As we’ve now told budding storytellers in close to a hundred diverse classrooms:
You don’t need a lab coat to collect climate data. My Climate Story is a public storytelling project that recognizes climate change data as stories about the people and places we care about. These personal experiences of climate change provide valuable additions to the quantifiable science as we continue to struggle to comprehend and to take action on the climate crisis.
Giving words to our experiences of climate change and sharing our stories also builds agency. Students who participate in this project emerge with a renewed sense of agency and purpose. The project is building “Agency in the Anthropocene.” I am working now to expand it across campuses.
My Climate Story Began on One Campus
The project began in 2018-2019, and it was just still possible, at least in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States, to imagine that climate change lay in the future, or that its global impacts were happening elsewhere, but not here. Now, living amidst increasingly flooded landscapes and breathing in air burnt by distant climate-fueled wildfires, most residents of the region understand that climate impacts aren’t lurking at the borders of a far-off future. They’ve arrived in the present, and they are shaping our experiences of the here and now.
It’s hard to keep up with our shifting climate–to find the names and terms for the changes we’re witnessing and to understand their implications. But climate education and general climate literacy do seem to be improving. The new climate literacy standards issued by NOAA in the fall of 2024 are heartening. My Climate Story continues to develop resources that educators can use in classrooms across the arts and sciences (and more about that in Part 2 of this short series).
Even amidst pandemic, the MCS platform took off, galvanized by the energy of collaborating teachers and students. In workshops and classrooms, we’ve been asking participants time and again, “What’s your climate story?” and we’ve archived their answers in the climate “Story Bank,” a collection of narrative climate data, lightly marked up with metadata to make it searchable by location, climate impact, and emotions. We’ve learned about sadness and the disappearance of childhood rituals, about anxiety for family members, particularly in migrant communities–and about how discovering and sharing climate stories offer a measure of solace. And we’ve seen how climate storytelling and story sharing also lead to climate action.
For the last two years, college student collaborators, Maria Villareal Simon and Faith Bochert, have pushed MCS to challenge students beyond my classes and workshops to discover and share their climate stories. Maria developed a roving campus reporter interviewing protocol. For months, she practiced her techniques on MCS’s core team, and then she spread her wings and began asking people all over campus if they would share their climate stories.
Her first task was to help her interviewees recognize that they did indeed have a climate story–even if they haven’t directly experienced wildfires or floods (although of course increasing numbers of them have). She published her interviews on tiktok. In this example, you hear Maria interviewing Kayla who talks about climate’s impacts on her home on Cape Cod.
My Climate Story Expands to Campuses across North America
Maria’s interviewing initiative was so successful that we decided to train students at other college and university campuses to be “Marias” on their campuses. Together, we launched a new plank in the platform, My Climate Story‘s Campus Correspondents initiative.
Six months in, Faith helped us tell the pilot’s story, “By the Numbers:” the number of campus climate stories our twelve correspondents reported that featured wildfires, for example, the number of short documentary videos they created, the number of articles they successfully placed in media outlets, the number of eyeballs their work got. Faith’s 1-minute video, seen here on the left, details the metrics.
The Campus Correspondents hailed from twelve colleges and universities in North America–from Georgia at the University of British Columbia, to Keithlyn at the Universidad Interamericana de Arecibo in Puerto Rico. We had 98 applicants for these 12 slots. In making the tough decisions about which bright stars we could support, we decided to accept only one student from each school, and to make sure the schools spanned distinct bioregions with diverse climate impacts. Two-thirds of the group identify as female. Five-sixths speak English as a first language, and we were especially thrilled to have reporters who could work across English and Spanish.
Right before we began training the Campus Correspondents, we turned the camera on Maria, inviting her to be interiewed, by Faith, and share more about how they developed the climate video format as well as their hopes for this pilot initiative to scale MCS across more campuses. They say a lot of really smart stuff, but as an educator, I especially appreciate their theory of change, and I especially love how Maria answered Faith’s question about how climate storytelling needs to be a part of climate education. Maria explains:
“There isn’t a lot of climate education in universities [beyond a small group of science majors], which is discouraging … It’s not a requirement or part of the [general education] curriculum. So we’ve also been discussing how change really happens from education … So if we get a sense from these Campus Correspondents and from their students’ [interviews] that this is [also] how students are feeling all over the country, that we’re missing climate education, then hopefully we can get some climate curriculum implemented into these schools.”
—Maria Villareal Simon, in conversation with Faith Bochert
In February 2024, we began training the Campus Correspondents to become roving reporters in two live two-hour workshops and a third asynchronous and self-guided session. In April, as Earth Day approached, we offered a third live session, this one designed to help our correspondents synthesize the stories they had been reporting into an op-ed essay. We called it the “op-ed writing sprint” (see below for this live workshop’s slides and embedded links to the worksheets and exercises I designed for it). Ten days before Earth Day, we taught students how to write op-eds, how to pitch, and we provided them the names and contacts of local news editors. They finished the live training on a Friday and we sent them sprinting to draft their essays by Monday. How amazing that fully 1/3 of our Correspondents’ pitches were picked up 🙂 Check out Campus Correspondent Ingrid Anderson’s essay in The Cap Times, from state capitol city, Madison, Wisconsin.
Training for the Op-Ed Essay-Writing Sprint
More Planks in the MCS Platform
MCS resonates with undergraduates, and it’s also resonated with their teachers. We are transforming climate education. Now, with colleagues and students at Stanford and at Princeton, we’re piloting climate storytelling curriculum that we plan to make more widely available in the coming months. Check back in this space for a follow-up post that previews those materials and gives glimpses into the workshops we ran in June 2024 in Palo Alto as well as the semester-long class, “Climate Storytelling for Climate Action,” that I’m teaching now, thanks to the generosity of High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton, where I’m working this academic year as the 2024-25 Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environmental Humanities.
