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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, our climate story of the week. It will be a different climate story of the week than we typically do. This will be a call-in for teachers on how you teach about climate at any grade level. Teachers, how do you and how has that changed over the years as the science of climate change and its current and potential effects have evolved?

212-433-WNYC 433-9692. This is also part of our week-long series of call-ins for teachers on how the culture wars are hanging over your classrooms. Climate change prevention is definitely on the ballot in the midterms. I heard a story this morning about Georgia's Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker saying Georgia has enough trees as a way to run against the climate protection bill that congress just passed.

That's electoral politics. When you teach climate science, do you reference the politics or the culture wars at all? In June, Newsweek reported on a study about how Facebook and Twitter have let climate fall into the culture wars. It says, according to Deny Deceived Delay, a study published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and the Coalition Climate Action Against Disinformation on June 9th, outright denialism has been replaced on mainstream social media platforms by narratives that discredit the need for immediate action and aim to make the climate crisis another front in the culture wars.

The article says, for example, that Facebook's algorithm drove greater exposure to climate disinformation than to its own climate science center. It says In April 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that climate disinformation was a big issue on the platform. The climate science center was set up to promote science-based information on Facebook, but it has failed to live up to expectations, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue study.

That from Newsweek and there's that on climate disinformation, our call-in is for teachers. How do you teach the science of climate change to students in different grades? Do you address the political and the culture war aspects? Or do you just leave that to the political science and social studies teachers? 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692. What about how you do this for different ages?

Anyone out there think you are the listener who mentions climate science to the youngest students? We would love to hear from you on how at 212-433-WNYC, is it in pre-K or kindergarten, first or second-grade science? When do you include climate science in the curriculum and how in the early grades? 212-433-WNYC 433-9692. As we get up into middle school and high school science classes, science teachers, are you listening today before school starts in a week or two?

I know for some of your school has started already, so you're probably not listening, but how do you teach climate science 101 in middle school or high school? Do you get into any of the politics or culture war aspects at that level? 212-433-WNYC. Maybe you probably deal with climate anxiety that's been well documented to exist in young Americans. Do you experience climate anxiety on the part of your students? If so, how do they or how do you talk about it in school, particularly in science class?

212-433-9692. It's our climate story of the week and part two of our week-long call-in for teachers on how the culture wars are hanging over your classrooms as the full term 2022 starts or gets ready to start. How do you teach about climate at any grade level and how has that changed over the years as the science of climate change and its current and potential effects have evolved? We're going to hear from all kinds of teachers now, it looks like. For example, Robert in Jersey City. Robert, you're on WNYC. Hi there. Thanks for calling in.

Robert: Hi, how are you doing today?

Brian Lehrer: Good. What have you got?

Robert: I'm a teacher in Jersey City and I'm a history teacher mainly, but the past few years I've been teaching macroeconomics and microeconomics. You essentially have to talk about the entire world when you're talking about history or any of the social studies. We get into how the climate has created some shortages in the supply chain issue, especially postcode and things like that.

In regards to the culture war aspect, I helped write part of the curriculum for-- We had to do a new social studies curriculum and New Jersey has a lot of mandates in that we put in. I think we're the second state that had a mandate for LGBTQ sources and actual lesson plans that teachers should-- it has to be part of the lesson. That as well as there's also mandates for climate change.

The issue is people are saying, "Oh, this is been happening so recently." The science has been there for 40, 45 years and it's not too recent. It's good that at least states like New Jersey and I think California and maybe Colorado have been putting in mandates so that it's required to teach about climate change and LGBTQ rights.

Brian Lehrer: Really interesting, Robert. Don't often hear those mentioned in the same breath as curriculum mandates, but I get what you're saying. Chrissy in [unintelligible 00:06:09]. You're on WNYC. Hi, Chrissy.

Chrissy: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I am a French and Spanish teacher in high school in Greenwich, Connecticut. The way that I like to talk about culture wars and teach that way is through journalism, reading articles from around the world in the target language that I'm teaching. It's incredibly fascinating to read articles from Latin America, from Africa because there's such a different perspective about how the climate change is affecting, especially developing nations.

It's super eye-opening for the kids. One hand they're getting some really incredible language skills, but they're also really learning how to look at journalism from different perspectives and different languages.

Brian Lehrer: That's so interesting. You're teaching climate change in language courses.

Chrissy: [chuckles] I'm sliding it in there yes.

Brian Lehrer: Any backlash from any parents or conservative watchdog groups in your district, anything like that?

Chrissy: Not as of yet, but I think also at the end of the day, the kids are just talking about interesting perspectives and learning to open their eyes to how to read a news article. it's just eye-opening for everyone. I hope and I think a lot of the parents in my district, or at least just impressed that their kids can come home and talk about an article from Senegal or from Guatemala or something like that. Then hopefully I haven't gotten any backlash yet.

Brian Lehrer: Chrissy, thank you very much. Really interesting so far, even though the explicit invitation was for science teachers, we've had an economics teacher and a French and Spanish language teacher. Here's Pat in Westport who I think is a special needs teacher. Pat, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling in.

Pat: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. What I wanted to say is that in special needs, we touch on many different grades, obviously, and what we focus on in Connecticut is empowerment. Most of the children and I work in an elementary school most of the children are already aware that there is a problem. They hear it on the news. They hear it, their parents talking about it.

As children, we want to find a way to help them feel like they can do something about it. We teach the three Rs reduce, reuse, recycle. We also have a science curriculum that has a thread throughout the year that may address things like erosion and climate change. Not so much from a good versus bad perspective, more of this is what's happening perspective. That's why I just wanted to say.

Brian Lehrer: Pat, thank you very much. Tricia in North Merrick. You're on WNYC. Hi, Tricia.

Tricia: Hi, I'm calling. I teach in an elementary school here on Long Island in North Merrick. I teach fourth grade. As I was telling your screener, particularly with science and climate change, I feel that it's very important or very effective to present the facts, not necessarily jamming a certain agenda down the children's throats, but to present it in such a way that these are the facts. Piggybacking on what you're at the caller said, you then have the power as a student to then make the change.

You're part of that next generation. There's also a fabulous resource out there that a lot of elementary schools use. It's by a publishing company called Scholastic, and it's called StoryWorks. It's a monthly literary magazine. There are fiction and nonfiction stories in this literary magazine, but very intelligently, very engaging to the students. There's always something in there about the environment, about ecology, about our effect on the planet. I find that that has been very useful as well.

One more thing, I just feel that as a teacher, it's very important not to necessarily jam your opinion or agenda, particularly with elementary school students. Because that can sometimes get misinterpreted and get misconstrued. When it's presented as "These are the facts," and you see them and you have the power to make that change, it's just much more acceptable than--

Brian Lehrer: Than saying, "This is what you should believe," which is what very few teachers actually do.

Tricia: Nobody wants to be told, "This is what you should believe."

Brian Lehrer: Tricia, I have a question about these materials for fourth graders that you've been describing. Do they ever touch on disinformation as a risk to people understanding climate science?

Tricia: No, they have not. That's a very good question. I have not come across that in the elementary school classroom that there can be misrepresentations or bad facts out there. I have not.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Thank you very much for your call. We really appreciate it from North Merrick. Allegra in Inwood, I think she's going to be really interesting too. We're going to get meta here about teaching the teachers, I think. Allegra, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

Allegra: Hi there. How are you?

Brian Lehrer: Good. You work at NASA?

Allegra: Yes. I'm a climate scientist at NASA here in New York City, that's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Every year, we have an internship program that has high school teachers who come, they intern with us doing climate change research projects, and then they produce curricula every year.

Brian Lehrer: How do you teach the teachers?

Allegra: I treat my teachers like I treat my graduate students. They get to do real research. I try to have them dig into actual climate model output, look at satellite retrievals. I just get in the nitty-gritty. From my perspective, sometimes I hear that the teachers are a little bit intimidated by there's so much stuff out there, just giving them a safe and fun place where they can explore the data, explore the experiments, explore with other teachers. It just makes them excited, makes them invigorated. It helps them, I think, make better curricula, I hope.

Brian Lehrer: There are so many studies, I don't have to tell you, on so many aspects of climate science. How do you decide in, what I guess is a relatively short amount of time, which studies to let them see and that might inform their teaching the most? It's one thing to look at what's happening in the Arctic, it's another thing to look at what's happening in the Global South, or so many things.

Allegra: I think we have about six scientist mentors and our projects are closely related to our own research. The last couple of years, my teachers have looked at a phenomenon called atmospheric rivers, which are most famous probably on the West Coast where you have extreme rainfall. Like the Pineapple Express, it comes through, connects Hawaii to the West Coast, and it causes extreme rain. It's something I actually research about, so I know. I review papers. I write papers. It's close to my heart and I'm excited about it, and hopefully it rubs off on the teachers, they become excited about it as well.

Brian Lehrer: That's great that you're doing that at NASA Goddard. Of course, that's where some of the original seminal research with James Hansen there on global warming came out in the '80s, so still at it at NASA Goddard. Allegra, thank you for checking in with us. Janpi in Bergen County, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Janpi: Hi, Brian Lehrer, so happy to be on your show. I'm a longtime listener and admirer.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. You are an actual science teacher, right?

Janpi: I teach chemistry in high in Englewood, in Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood.

Brian Lehrer: How does climate come into the chemistry curriculum?

Janpi: [chuckles] I want to say a little bit about why I chose teaching first. I chose teaching because I've been worried about climate change since I was a teenager, like from the '70s. There were not many avenues to make any good change, and so when my kids got grown up I changed my career to teaching. In chemistry, I try to insert a little bit about climate education.

I try to get a feel from my students whether they're worried about climate change. Some of them are. I'm able to address those concerns, be optimistic with them. I'm able to show them how when there was concern with chlorofluorocarbons and United Nations had this agreement between nations for limiting chlorofluorocarbons. How we were able to recognize internationally about the ozone hole and we made a change there. I like to bring some optimism to them in the context of chemistry. That's what I do in an off-curricular way, I try to insert it in my lessons.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. We just have 15 seconds left, but do you hear a lot of climate anxiety on the part of your students?

Janpi: Some of them, yes. Many of them, no. Some of them will limit the use of their air conditioners. Some of them are really worried about it, especially those who've been affected by it from many of the immigrants.

Brian Lehrer: Floods or whatever, or in their countries of origin. Janpi in Bergen County, thank you so much for calling in. Thanks to all of you who called in, in this combination climate story of the week and part of our weeklong call-in for teachers as we get ready for the new school year.

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