Stories from the Climate Crisis: A Mixer
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/climate-crisis-mixer
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/climate-crisis-mixer
Bill Bigelow, Zinn Education Project
This learning activity takes one 45min class period
Learn more about Teaching Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness»
See how this Activity supports the Next Generation Science Standards»
Grade Level
Online Readiness
Topics
Climate Literacy
This Activity builds on the following concepts of Climate Literacy.
Click a topic below for supporting information, teaching ideas, and sample activities.
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Teaching Tips | Science | Pedagogy |
Technical Details
Teaching Tips
- Providing a few sentence starters could be useful to help guide students in their discussions.
- The lesson suggests having the teacher play a character to get a sense of the amount of time students will need.
- Allow students enough time to read about their roles and discuss them with someone next to them before moving about the classroom.
- Teachers could extend the investigation of the impacts of climate change on the various regions represented by including bio-sketches.
- There are sensitive topics included in this activity (e.g gentrification, immigration) so teachers should be prepared to facilitate discussion around those topics.
- Teachers should be mindful of students depicting stereotypes & biases.
About the Content
- A very interesting and engaging role-play activity based on the perspectives of real people on how climate change is impacting their lives.
- Teachers may want to look for additional resources to support this activity and to discuss climate change.
- Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
About the Pedagogy
- Prerequisites include a basic understanding of the causes and effects of climate change.
- Students are given a role to embody and questions to answer as they engage in conversations with classmates.
- Teaching tips are included at the beginning of the activity.
- There are a few basic directions for educators and there is a paper available that discusses how this was used in the classroom.
- Teachers should be aware to spend extra time building scaffolding for ESL students or diverse learners. If there are many ESL students who speak the same language, it could be helpful to allow students to discuss in the language they are most comfortable with and/or switch languages as they are comfortable if there is a thought they are attempting to articulate.
- Since the activity calls for moving around the classroom and discussing with others, teachers may need to make accommodations for disabled students.
- This is a conversation-based activity with a lot of flexibility for teachers to adapt to their classroom, and an ideal activity to encourage student discussion.
