Educating for Disability and Climate Change
By David Liebmann
Children starting kindergarten in 2023 will be 32 years old in 2050, the year the Paris Climate Accord signatories agreed to reach net zero carbon emissions. Those 32-year-olds will have grown up with signs of climate change appearing everywhere around them. They must learn enough in school about the changing global environment to lead themselves and the next generation into a livable future. This education should also incorporate teaching about disability and the disparate impacts of climate change on people with disabilities.
Of the 50 million students in the U.S., 14.5% of those students are considered special education students, the term for “students with mental, physical, emotional, and behavioral disabilities.” That’s more than 7 million children. Other than sharing a building and perhaps a classroom with those children with disabilities, the other 43 million students don’t learn much about their peers. They come to their own conclusions about disability. Nine states teach about disability rights in required curricula. It’s a better-than-nothing, scattershot approach that leaves disability to be largely framed by inaccurate if not demeaning portrayals in media, television, and film. Disability is seen as a mystery, with students’ understanding of disability emerging mostly from a vacuum.
Arguably, people with disabilities may be disproportionately affected by climate change not only because of their disabilities but often because of their economic status. People with disabilities already experience employment gaps, which are exacerbated by educational inequalities. Charlie Williams, Climate Scientist and Research Fellow at the University of Bristol (UK), himself disabled, notes, “it is a multifactorial process; with possibly a lack of education, resulting in a lack of employment, resulting in a lack of financial security, being the main reason why disabled people will be amongst the hardest-hit [by climate change].”
Rather than accept this as the unalterable future, educators have the power and responsibility to change classroom and school system practices now so that the students of 2050 and the parents who raise them benefit from the best climate change and disability awareness education we can offer. In all this, including the full range of voices will make for better, more inclusive outcomes.
Currently, students in the U.S. are exposed to a range of approaches to instruction about climate science according to Katie Worth, author of Miseducation: How Climate Change is Taught in America. Worth mapped “academic standards pertaining to climate change onto a red, blue, purple map of the country.” She found strong climate change education in blue states and mixed results in red states. “The majority had standards that either they didn’t mention [climate change] at all, they mentioned it as a scientific debate, which is inaccurate, or they very lightly handled it.” In fact, currently, only students in New Jersey and Connecticut take required lessons about climate change. The highly politicized nature of climate change science has made it challenging for teachers to address the topic in schools today, Steven Moody, Director of Science for the Fulton County Public Schools in Atlanta, Georgia told me in an interview last April. Nearly 90,000 students in that district experience a patchwork of lessons about climate change, with Moody noting that teachers are nervous about broaching what might be a controversial topic among some families. As those children prepare for adulthood, they must receive lessons based on science, and not political winds.
Beyond teaching individual lessons to students in class, it’s vital to remember that children learn and grow within educational systems for years before launching into the adult world. Those bureaucratic systems can be modified to pave better paths for the future. Some examples of areas that bear attention include land use, electricity generation and use, building design, and food production and composting.
Often “public school districts are among the largest landowners in almost every city and town across the United States.” Nearly 100,000 public K–12 schools occupy 2 million acres of land across the country. How that land is used and the systems to support school infrastructure offer environmentally sustainable ways to modify whole systems. Solar farms can be established on unused school property to generate renewable power for the electrical grid. School buses can be converted to run on electricity. Pilot programs are underway that can provide models for other parts of the country.
Green building design presents another clear path forward to more efficient learning spaces. School building authorities can create standards that shift practice in this critical area. With 100,000 school building in the US, 53% of which need significant systems upgrades or replacements, this is an area ripe for improvement.
Schools serve millions of meals a day. How that food is procured beginning with clear climate-friendly expectations for farmers can allow this huge market to shift the agricultural system, a significant contributor to climate change. School meal programs generate nearly 530,000 tons of food waste a year. Food waste can be composted at a large scale and soil regenerated in a virtuous cycle.
All of these things are possible if schools are willing to help lead the way. Our students deserve no less.
David Liebmann has been a pre-K – 12 educator for more than thirty years.
