Youth Climate Education in Action
What is Enacting Climate?
Enacting Climate is an online collection of climate-related tools and activities for student learning and climate action.
This open-source collection includes:
1) Enacting Solutions: Adaptations and Translations of the Drawdown Climate Solutions
This resource offers top climate solutions identified by leading climate experts in a lively format accessible to K-12 students and non-specialists (the top 20 available in Spanish too). This Open Educational Resource (OER) is an adaptation of top climate solutions from Project Drawdown that lists and describes the top 86 most impactful solutions for reversing global warming. This adaptation is adjusted to target a 5th grade reading level, but students younger and older will enjoy the engaging writing, descriptive illustrations, and vibrant photos. Each Drawdown solutions has its own 1-2-page entry that provides a written description and story of the solution, illustrations to help students visualize this solution in context, along with further research sources.
This resource is created by a team at the University of Colorado led by Patrick Chandler (ENVS PhD Student) and Beth Osnes (associate professor of Theatre and Environmental Studies) with numerous undergraduate and graduate students. Along the process, we have had our adaptations peer reviewed by 5th grade students and teachers. These solutions are classroom-ready to support climate education and to inspire meaningful climate action.
2) Enacting Climate is an Open Educational Resource that shares embodied and creative ways for students to reverse global warming
This lively platform supports youth in enacting an equitable, survivable, and thrive-able future for all life and the ecosystems upon which all life depends. Activities are creative, performance-based, and embodied
Each activity can be linked with other modules or used alone. All activities in this collection are
- Embodied and creative
- Classroom tested
- Ready to use in a ‘grab and go’ format
- Non-disposable assignments that can be disseminated to effect policy action
- Fun and/or aesthetically stirring
- Adjustable for 5th-universtiy level youth
- Supported with instructions, videos, and/or professional development options
- Associated with a curated, published collection of student work resulting from each module, to which you can submit your student work for possible inclusion (www.insidethegreenhouse.org)
This collection of activities is designed to support creative climate communication and behavior change. It supports students in generating expressions to inspire their circles of influence to adopt pro-environmental policies at the governmental, business, school, family or individual level. The development of each module in this collection is:
- Grounded in science
- Informed by social science on effective climate engagement
- Enacted through performance and policy
- Disseminated openly