Embodying Change: Courses that Integrate Narrative, Storytelling, and Embodied Learning in Climate Change Education

Abstract

In the face of accelerating climate change, effective education is paramount to fostering informed citizens and enacting meaningful action. Effective climate instruction contextualizes content so that students are engaged emotionally (affect) and can translate science into action. This paper describes six courses that use integrated approaches to science instruction which encourage perspective taking through narrative analysis, storytelling, and/or embodied pedagogy. Students engage in content by learning different historical, cultural, or experiential perspectives of the topic. Several courses also use embodied pedagogy, which integrates physical movement and sensory experiences into the learning process. The manuscript provides a summary of each course, then uses a newly developed climate change integration rubric to complete a thematic analysis, describing how these approaches connect climate change learning across a curriculum and empower students to action. The final section describes specific ways in which these principles could be incorporated into chemistry curricula.