From the classroom to the community: Teachers as climate change leaders

Teachers around the world are preparing the next generation to respond to the climate crisis. Their central role in shaping students must be acknowledged. On Earth Day 2023, we share what some of them had to say about investing in our children and our planet.

“A key missing ingredient in global education reform is teacher agency. This worldwide movement where we are asking ‘what is the educational response to the climate crisis?’ is an opportunity to reiterate the need for supporting teachers and that they are the leaders of learning,” says Dr Andy Cunningham, the Global Lead for Education at the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF).

AKF, in partnership with the Learning Planet Institute, Teach For All and a number of partners including Dubai Cares, UNESCO and 17 Rooms, launched the Teachers for the Planet Programme, inviting educators from around the world to share and discuss their solutions to climate and education at school and system levels.

“Having the light of the Teach For All Climate Education Community helps us to keep breathing, keep fighting and strengthens us on the inside,” says Egoitz Etxeandia, a secondary school teacher in Spain and an alumnus of Empieza por Educar (part of the Teach For All global network). “There’s an instant connection that I get with others from places like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Nepal and Paraguay, who I’ve never met.”

Egoitz, who teaches economics, entrepreneurship, business and marketing, used his own interest in the circular economy to create lessons on his core subjects while also making remarkable environmental impacts.

“Students will be the shapers in society in less than five or 10 years, so I don’t want to just explain different economic theories to them, I want them to understand the necessity of being social activists and using different design thinking methodologies,” he says.

Egoitz has his students create product-based businesses, with one caveat – the products must be made out of waste. Students have created businesses selling soap made of leftover cooking oils from local restaurants; retro-style furniture out of discarded soda cans; and reusable shopping bags out of discarded facemasks (with advice from local hospitals on how to ensure this was sanitary). Each project generates revenue that is then used in the next project.

When students learned that 17,000 tonnes of coffee ground waste was produced in Spain each year, they began to collect coffee grounds and used them to grow edible oyster mushrooms as part of a project called Funghi Thinking. They learned how to code motherboards to measure humidity and temperature of the growth area every three minutes for 40 days, also learning about big data and data analysis. Students researched and developed prototypes for how the mushrooms could be packaged with organic materials and then created plans to acquire basic business principles, financial literacy and marketing skills.

“My former students tell me they have forgotten a lot of economic theories, but they still remember the projects and how important they felt,” Egoitz says. “We need to rethink the way we are teaching. We’ve changed from books to iPads and blackboards to digital boards but the methodologies persist. Every teacher is different and every student is different so the way we connect with students has to be different, it has to change over time.”

Esther Gacigi, a primary school teacher and Teach For Kenya fellow (part of the Teach For All global network), believes this change should start early. “We need behaviour change to be ingrained in students from a very young age. If they learn to live sustainably now, then it will be easy for them to do that into the future,” she says.

Esther’s climate education project was inspired after she discovered a gap in the curriculum. Her students learned about unfavourable weather conditions and how to grow innovative gardens, but never learned the “why” behind these lessons – climate change and food insecurity.

In Esther’s community, two major problems are food insecurity and waste management. With a huge dump site located right outside her school in Nairobi, she engaged her Grade 3 students to collect and clean plastic waste from the site, using it to plant vegetables.

AKF and partners have launched Schools2030, a participatory learning improvement programme that supports teachers to design and implement education micro-innovations. One project, Play, Pluralism and the Planet, catalyses new teacher-driven solutions to better integrate climate-literate, climate-compassionate and climate-resilient education into the curriculum.

Former teacher Shaibu Athuman is AKF’s national coordinator for Schools2030 in Tanzania, working with the government and 30 secondary schools to implement climate solutions such as micro-forests.

A micro-forest is a small, planted forest (anywhere from 100 to 10,000 square metres) that maximises tree density and biodiversity, while reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. In their design, AKF emphasises the protection of endemic and indigenous species and the planting of food and medicinal plants that can be useful to local communities.

To date, 15 school micro-forests have been planted with the participation of 275 students. Teachers leverage the micro-forests to teach subjects such as biology, conservation and maths. The micro-forests also offer opportunities to explore themes such as pluralism, inclusion and respect for diversity as each micro-forest offers a concrete living example of how different species live together and depend on one another.

Kit Dashwood, who designed the project, speaks highly of the teachers involved: “They were plotting out measurements and selecting tree varieties, and they found ways to connect it to their curriculum beyond what even we had thought of,” he says. “They are able to contextually adapt the micro-forest lesson for their own educational needs, local environment and student input.”

“Studies of teachers show that 95 percent of teachers feel that environmental education is important,” says Alex Holland, curriculum development manager for the Aga Khan Schools (AKS). “The bigger question is how will the knowledge from classrooms translate to action in lives, families, schools and the wider community?”

Teachers and school leaders at AKS are working to ensure that environmental lessons in the classroom lead to students taking action for change in the real world.

Rubab Busheri is the early childhood development section head at the Diamond Jubilee High School for Girls, in Mumbai, India. “Young children are like a sponge, they take in everything we teach them and then they go home and share about what they learned with their parents and family,” says Rubab. “We have done classroom-style lessons showing students pictures of clean versus dirty streets and asking them to come up with ways to have a clean street. But we also have them take action with planting activities and making their own reusable bags.”

“The follow up to these lessons are done in primary and secondary as well. There are eco-clubs, field trips for planting seeds and more advanced lessons on how to convert old clothes into cloth bags. They are ideas that come from the teachers, based on how the students learn best,” says Rubab. “Sometimes the students come up with their own activities and then the teacher becomes a facilitator”: the definition of success for a teacher preparing the next generation to inherit the Earth.

Across the various initiatives, one goal is clear for the future of climate and education – teachers must be invited to lead and imagine what is possible in partnership with communities and young people to best co-design the educational response to the climate crisis.