Call for Climate Classroom Teachers

Posted by Penn Program in Environmental Humanities on September 28, 2021

The Penn Program in Environmental Humanities is looking to co-create ten climate classrooms in schools across greater Philadelphia. We want to partner with you to support climate literacy in our region! The My Philadelphia Climate Story project is a two-year engagement that centers educators and students and the power of personal narratives. It addresses the climate emergency with workshops, curriculum building, experiential learning, and multimedia storytelling.

If you:

• Are a tenth-grade teacher working in a School District of Philadelphia classroom
• Have an interest in bringing themes of climate education and justice to your students
• Would like a stipend and material support for bringing an exciting new curriculum to your classroom in partnership with the University of Pennsylvania
• Can commit to a two-year project requiring approximately six hours per month in the academic year

Please reply to director@ppehlab.org with:

• a short personal statement about why you would like to be involved (200 words or less);
• a lesson plan you currently use that relates to climate, storytelling, environmental education, or other related area;
• a teaching philosophy (100 words);
• questions you may have.

My Philadelphia Climate Story recognizes the urgent need to integrate climate literacy into all levels of education and training. It responds to that need by sharing and expanding interactive climate literacy materials, piloted in AY 2020-21 in twenty remote workshops, with ten tenth-grade Philadelphia-area public school teachers. A short documentary about this pilot project is viewable here.

Working with faculty and students from the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, the Netter Center, and the Graduate School of Education, participating teachers and students develop climate stories, i.e., personal stories about how local climate impacts are shaping their life stories–and about how those impacts are making them feel.

For a full description of My Philadelphia Climate Story, please read on and visit my-climate-story-org. We’d be grateful if you shared this call widely, and thank you for your interest and your help in spreading the word about this exciting new project.