A review of Mark Windschitl's Teaching Climate Change

Abstract

The interdisciplinary nature of climate change often makes teaching the topic overwhelming for instructors, particularly if their own training and background did not focus on climate science. The difficulties educators may face upon planning and implementation of climate change content does not detract from the importance of its inclusion in our science curricula. In fact, educational standards for K-12 settings (i.e., NGSS Lead States, 2013) and many higher education disciplines (i.e., biology: 4DEE, Klemow et al., 2019; chemistry: VC3, Mahaffy et al., 2017; geosciences: Cervato et al., 2018) have included climate change as an integral topic to include in our curricula. But, where do we start? How do we determine what to discuss in our classrooms while making sure we align this content with our learning objectives or institutional standards? Dr. Mark Windschitl's book, Teaching Climate Change, seeks to answer this question by providing educators with examples of topics to cover and suggestions for how to implement these topics in a variety of classroom settings. Windschitl leverages his expertise in Science Teaching and Learning to provide educators a starting framework to incorporate climate change topics in their classrooms. The first three chapters of Windschitl's book discuss the importance of climate change education, outlines the difficulties instructors face, and summarizes background knowledge on climate change content. From there, Windschitl uses the later chapters to dive deeper into more specific aspects of climate change education such as using models and data in the classroom (Chap. 7-9) and how to build climate resilience in our students (Chap. 4 and 10).