The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators - by Jennifer Atkinson & Sarah Jaquette Ray

Book Synopsis

An easy-to-use field guide for teaching on climate injustice and building resilience in your students--and yourself--in an age of crisis.

As feelings of eco-grief and climate anxiety grow, educators are grappling with how to help students learn about the violent systems causing climate change while simultaneously navigating the emotions this knowledge elicits. This book provides resources for developing emotional and existential tenacity in college classrooms so that students can stay engaged.

Featuring insights from scholars, educators, activists, artists, game designers, and others who are integrating emotional wisdom into climate justice education, this user-friendly guide offers a robust menu of interdisciplinary, plug-and-play teaching strategies, lesson plans, and activities to support student transformation and build resilience. The book also includes reflections from students who have taken classes that incorporate their emotions in the curricula. Galvanizing and practical, The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators will equip both educators and their students with tools for advancing climate justice.

From the Back Cover

"The authors put language to many of the ways students and educators are traversing this moment in planetary history. The perspectives presented in these chapters will help educators across multiple disciplines build a meaningful curriculum for navigating climate uncertainty and anxiety."--Jessica L. Thompson, Professor at the College of Business, Northern Michigan University

"The Existential Toolkit provides a necessary framework for environmental educators to understand and respond to our students' (and our own) environmental distress. From new research to pedagogical tools and skill-building, this book will be an invaluable resource for environmental studies teachers for a long time to come."--Jade Sasser, author of Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future

"This book is destined to become a well-worn field guide for environmental educators worldwide, and the need for it at this time can't be overstated. Educators who are daunted by their students' climate anxiety, despair, or outrage, and instructors who feel like throwing up their hands at the complexity of what it means to teach well in the polycrisis, will find many of their concerns addressed in this volume. Much more than a book about trauma-informed climate education (though it is also that), this is a mind-expanding read about justice, decolonization, and imagination, chock full of pedagogical interventions you can try in the classroom."--Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread and Director of CIRCLE (Community-minded Interventions for Resilience, Climate Leadership, and Emotional wellbeing) at Stanford Psychiatry

"This book is a quilt of practical wisdom--generous offerings from those reshaping the classroom to meet the call of climate justice. We must better equip students for this time of trouble and transformation. Here, you'll find approaches to do so in abundance."--Katharine K. Wilkinson, coeditor of All We Can Save and lead writer of Drawdown

"The way I think, teach, and feel about climate change has been permanently and positively altered by the extraordinary wisdom embodied in this powerful work of deep reflection, care, and healing."--David N. Pellow, author of What Is Critical Environmental Justice? and Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara

"This book offers concrete assignments and practices that not only advance emotional engagement with climate justice, but also practice climate justice. This new and important resource helps educators support and channel the emotions of all classroom participants toward building the world we need, and building relationships of support to live within crisis."--Corrie Grosse, author of Working across Lines: Resisting Extreme Energy Extraction

"This wide-ranging volume provides topics, perspectives, and tools to help educators in the vital project of teaching climate justice. It highlights the need to attend to social inequities and emphasizes the important role of emotions in enabling resilience and resistance in the face of climate change."--Susan Clayton, developer of the Climate Change Anxiety Scale

Review Quotes

". . . I suspect even the most senior, experienced educators among us--the 'executive chefs, ' to return to the cookbook analogy Atkinson and Ray use in their introduction--will find something new or provocative for their teaching methods within the earnest reflections compiled here. Dig in."-- "Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment"

"The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators is an interdisciplinary amalgam of lesson plans and assignments for teaching about the climate crisis and climate change with the goal of helping students understand their emotions about the subject and to turn their emotions into positive activities."-- "PRO-COMM Professional Communications Society"

About the Author

Jennifer Atkinson is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, and author of Gardenland: Nature, Fantasy, and Everyday Practice.

Sarah Jaquette Ray is Professor of Environmental Studies at Cal Poly Humboldt and author of A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet.