Teaching in the Age of Humans: Helping Students Think about Climate Change

To convey the magnitude and rapidity of current climate change and the severity of predictions for the next century, I present essential climate science information using four key sets of data and contextualize that information with personal anecdotes. I then consider the reasons for the large gap between the scientific consensus about anthropogenic climate change and public perceptions of that consensus. With several known challenges to climate change education in mind, I offer four recommendations for teachers that map relevant social psychology to pedagogy: (1) establish a learning community that works to disrupt in-group favoritism and reduce attribution bias; (2) help students identify a set of superordinate goals to reduce intergroup conflict; (3) structure discourse toward deliberation rather than dispute to minimize the effects of loss aversion and confirmation bias; and (4) help students concretize their beliefs by asking them to think in terms of actual people, places, and events.