In the final episode of the CHLL podcast series 3: Intergenerational Dinner Reflections, Cally, Heather, Lois, and Louise reflect on the week they have just shared together in Utah.  They look back on the successful intergenerational dinner for 40 guests at the beginning of the week, their trip to the Aspen Pando in the middle of the week, and what they learned from the five guests that participated in the earlier episodes in this series.

Lois shares that her big takeaway from the week was that it is really as simple as having conversations.  Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General has said that loneliness is a public health issue in this country, and that community is the solution.  Cally, Heather, Lois and Louise discuss what they think made the June 27 intergenerational dinner such a success for the 40 people that attended, and what they see as some next steps.  

The CHLL podcast hosts are students of Margaret Wheatley who says that “whatever the problem, community is the solution.”  The group reflects on what may evolve of the rich learning experiences they and others had in Utah during this week in June of 2023.
 

Mistakes

The group reflects on how important it is to be willing to make and admit to mistakes for real learning to take place.   Community can provide the conditions to have the courage to act, make mistakes and learn from them.  Cally shares about how the Native American curriculum initiative, developed with her team and partners at Brigham Young University, was founded on the guiding principle that individuals would have to accept that they would inevitably make mistakes, and that the importance of the initiative took precedence over individual ego.  She shares how the group learned to give each other the grace to teach each other and learn.
 

Leadership

In this episode the CHLL hosts gain clarity that the role of leadership is to create the community necessary for people to do the hard work they need to do. Leadership is about creating the spaces where each and every person feels comfortable sharing and listening.  They reflect on their individual and shared responsibility to continue to invite people into well designed conversations, and to encourage others to do the same.  The stakes are too high to simply lament the divisions among individuals and groups.  It is the role of leadership to understand that we need each other, we need community, we need conversation, we need understanding, we need a collective purpose, and leadership must bring people together to create the community that will serve the collective purpose.
 

Learning From Nature

The day following the intergenerational dinner, Cally Heather, Lois and Louise traveled to southern Oregon to visit the Aspen Pando.  The Aspen Pando is 106 acres of a single male Aspen tree that sends out underground stems from which trunks go up. The Pando is a single  organism that presents itself as 106 acres of individual aspen trees.  The Pando is the largest, and possibly the oldest living organism on the planet. Cally, Heather, Lois and Louise share what they learned from the Pando about the interdependence and connectedness of all living things.

In this episode the group recommits to continuing intergenerational conversations to improve education, and to building spaces for communities to better prepare to manage together the very hard questions of our time.

Resources: 

Aspen Pando

In this episode Cally talks with two people, from different generations who attended the June 27, 2023 dinner in Heber Utah, who are both personal friends and mentors to Cally.  Cally, at 60 years old, is a baby boomer and she talks with Kay who, at 81 years, is from the silent generation and Heather who is a millennial at 32 years of age. 

They share experiences, such as learning to cook, garden, do home repairs or sew clothes or costumes, that have, across the decades, instilled in them a sense of resourcefulness and self confidence.  They describe watching a parent can fruit, or repair an appliance as a kind of early mentoring experience, that they feel lucky to continue to practice in their current relationships: Cally to Heather, Heather to Cally, Cally to Kay and Kay to Cally.  The mentoring is by no means one way.  It is not necessarily older woman to younger woman, but rather reciprocal.  Cally instantly recognized Kay’s wisdom and experience, and Kay marveled at Cally’s ability to develop programs and networks which were made successful by Heather’s keen skills at project management and systems development.

They wonder and reflect on whether well-intentioned risk management for children today, interferes with young people’s ability to develop the kind of self-reliance that these women are grateful for in their own lives.  They wonder about how social media, and social distancing, have impacted young people’s opportunities to meet and connect with others in ways that these women have benefited greatly from.  

They discuss that too much emphasis is put on curriculum and assessment in education, and not enough emphasis on relationships and connection.

Kay says, “There is real power that comes from helping your peers and sharing information. In the end, it's the connectedness that matters.  There are many kids that haven't had role models or the resources that we were lucky to grow up with.  But I have observed, and I have a sacred belief in, the resilience of human beings to find what they need and become the best they are. There are so many potential detours, but the resilience of human beings is always there.”

Cally agrees.  “Yes, all learning happens within relationships.  It is the teacher that establishes that culture. And when that happens, the role of teaching can be from student to student, student to teacher, teacher to student, and everyone learns from each other.”

They discuss how important mentoring for teachers is, and that too often the most important professional development is overlooked by practices that keep teachers isolated from each other.  They discuss how important it is to continue to work for improving public education because it is the one institution that will always be intergenerational. 

At 81 years of age, Kay is in the process of creating a new women's organization that lifts up the experience of older women and connects it with the vitality and new ideas of younger women.  The group discusses how their various projects intersect and inform each other.

Mark Borchelt, a boomer, and Christine Baird, a millennial, were both table hosts at the June 27 intergenerational dinner in Heber, Utah on June 27.  In the second episode in this series, they bring reflections on how the individuals representing the six generations interfaced with each other.  While both Mark and Christine shared that everyone enjoyed the opportunity to be in conversation with five to six other people from different generations, they also did not necessarily appreciate the generational designations or stereotypes.  This was specifically true for members of the so-called Silent Generation, who did not experience themselves, or their peers, as silent.  It was explained that the misnomer “silent” generation came from the fact that this generation experienced the McCarthy era: a time of communist baiting and persecution for political beliefs, when it was not safe to speak.  Many people lost their jobs, their livelihoods and their reputations as part of this oppressive era.

Mark and Christine discuss with Lois how influential the logistics of the dinner were to its success.  The beautiful out of doors setting, the mountains in the backdrop, the delicious food, the luxurious timing, the thoughtful reflective conversation prompts, and the very fact that everyone needed to travel some little distance to be in Heber, getting away from it all, contributed to comfort and success of the evening.

Mark said, “I love the fact that we had to drive to get to the Merrill's house, because it was like this coming together required various groups and ages to make an effort to arrive at this opportunity. It was like passing through a threshold to speak to one another. And it was great walking around and saying, Wow, they did a fantastic job of getting a nice cross section of ages. And there was this lovely representation of humanity, I guess is the best way I'd like to describe it. The facilitation of the conversation was incredibly easy for me, because people were not shy about speaking or sharing their experiences. The environment was outstanding, the food was delicious, and everything just congealed to allow people to feel comfortable in productive ways.”

Christine concurred, “I didn't understand why we were driving all the way to Heber to do this dinner, which I think for everyone was a long drive. But once I arrived, and was in an environment that was very separate from the middle of a city, it absolutely helped us focus on what we were there for. I think one of my favorite parts about being a facilitator was that no one at the table knew each other and it was an absolute clean slate. It was this beautiful opportunity that I've never had before, to sit at a table where I purposefully was different from everyone else, and no one knew each other. We were there for a common purpose that was away from our normal lives created for listening. It was just the coolest that everyone got to answer the same question because there was time for everyone. We all were overjoyed to hear everyone's response to every question. I'm qualified, just because I have lived the amount of years I've been alive. So cool.” 

Mark adds, “Yeah, I noticed some of that too, because I was trying to make sure everyone felt comfortable. Everyone was impacted by the example set by the person who spoke before them. It was unspoken, but very powerful. We were inspired by each other to open up. I had the sense that people immediately bonded at each table.  This was made possible, I think, by the opening mingling activity, and then I appreciated the movement activity at the conclusion that brought everyone back together as a larger group.”

Christine learned new things.  “A member at our table of Generation X, shared that she was born in 1970 and thought it was the most idyllic time to have ever been born. She had the most wonderful childhood. Growing up in the 70s and the 80s was so cool. There was all this fun life and art and culture and socialization.” Christine had never heard that from someone her age, now in her 50s. She realized that she knew so little about growing up in the 70s and 80s. “I had mostly heard about the 70s and 80s being a kind of hot mess, and that everyone was freaking out and having an identity crisis. It made me so happy to hear what had happened from her perspective because it was before my time. I didn't get here till 1987.”

Mark adds, “Our silent generation, our octogenarian, was talking about how you get to a certain age and you feel that you're being silenced.  People don't see you. She was talking about a recent health scare and people in the medical industry were looking at her and doing tests and she felt basically being cheated.  Their attitude seemed to be, ‘You've already had a great life.’ But this person felt, ‘Wait, I have a lot more living that I would like to do.’  She felt that she was being placed on a shelf and didn’t know where she fit in or how to interact. And the  millennial at our table said, ‘Oh my gosh, I'd never made that connection. I think my generation, especially in our 20s, that's exactly how we felt. I didn't have my voice yet.  It’s interesting to see that spiral, that it comes back around.’”

And Christine continues, “That reminds me of one other of my favorite moments. When we were discussing whether individuals have friends who are 10, 20, 30 years older or younger than you, Karma, who is 91 years old said in the most beautiful, crystal clear, confident way, ‘If you were a friend, you were a friend.’ It had never occurred to her for a moment in her 91 years that there would be a qualification that you needed to be somewhere in the same age range to be a friend.  She had such a beautiful perspective on life.”

Mark, Christine and Lois continue to share what they are realizing about the specific and special qualities unique to interacting with people from different generations.  Lois reflects on how so much in our culture is designed for us to stay in our own generational cohorts, and she wonders what we can do to make intergenerational interactions more possible.

Christine offers some ideas and observes that arts experiences that are open to the community, whether they're ticketed or not, are some of the best ways to mix with multiple generations.  She suggests investing in our local communities and supporting music concerts, plays, art exhibitions and farmers markets as great places to naturally interact with young and old and in  between. The group recognized that they often felt more competitive with people their own age, and less of that kind of self judgment with people who are much older or younger. 

The design of the dinner offered the opportunity to listen to someone else's experience from another generation that unlocked connections and self-processing, and opened up a space of possibility for talking across other identity differences such as gender, racial, faith and ideological differences.

In the first episode of Season 3, titled, How the Times Change Perspective, Heather meets with Dan and Erik, Baby Boomers who both attended the Intergenerational Dinner hosted by the CHLL team in Heber, Utah on June 27, 2023.  They share their experiences as members of the Baby Boomer generation, their reflections on intergenerational families, and the generational experiences of Baby Boomers that have shaped and influenced their lives.

Erik shares about growing up in an intergenerational jewish family in Los Angeles.  The group discusses how expectations for a linear life path of education, job and growing a family have  changed and shifted over decades.

Dan reflects on social changes that occurred during the Baby Boomers formative years:

“Divorce  became much more common in our generation because of the economic changes. It's   an incredible stress to think of surviving on your own even if it's a time of prosperity. But I think part of why divorce became more common is because the survival of the individual was no longer threatened as much, with the war and the depression over.”

The group reflects on what they consider to be major generational shifts.  The so-called Silent Generation was the “we” generation.  Women went to work in the factories, while men went off to war in a fight against fascism.  Everyone was expected to pitch in. Baby Boomers were the “me” generation, enjoying an affluent period where individuals carved new social and moral norms, resisted the draft, and engaged in public protests.  They told their children, the millennials, that they could have anything they wanted and be whatever they wanted to be.  But the millennials have grown into a time of economic and environmental uncertainty, limiting the opportunities their parents enjoyed.

Resources: 

Generations Over Dinner

So much of what has been shared and discussed in this series on classrooms and climate change, has been focused on what adults think, say, do or do not do.  In this final episode of the series, “Is Climate Change Changing Classrooms” the CHLL group (Cally, Heather, Lois and Louise) reflect on what young people have to say through their artistic expressions.  The Brigham Young University Arts Education Partnership hosts an annual art competition for all grade levels, in all art forms.  It’s part of an initiative called Arts for Life, Utah. The purpose is to highlight the impact of the arts on students' lives, particularly their social and emotional well being. The initiative is a collaboration between the BYU Arts Partnership where Cally and Heather work, and the four professional arts education organizations in Utah. The competition is called M(arts)ch Madness, and includes a bracket style competition inspired by the athletics March Madness. Students submit their work showing the impact of the arts in their life and their schooling experience. Usually the theme is Arts for Life. But this year students were asked to submit work on the theme of Earth, Arts and Life, in an effort to surface students' perspectives on the environment, as well. 

Examples of the student artwork and their artist statements are here in the show notes.  The CHLL team reflected on what they noticed about the interface of the Earth, Arts and Life in student work, and what they could learn from student perspectives.

Cally 

I would love to start with one of the paintings that's very memorable for me. There's so many artworks that I love, but I want to start with one, a high school 11th grader. This is his artist statement, “The name of my art piece is progress. It depicts a crow looking up at the clouded sky, knowing that he is not able to fly high without harming himself.  I created my own paint out of smoke, which allowed me to paint the piece purely with smoke paint. I decided to use a crow, as crows are black and highly intelligent, which allowed for the use of monochrome colors. The piece is titled ‘Progress’.  It shows an industrialized city filled with factories and buildings shooting pollution up into the air. I use smoke to represent how we as humans are affecting the Earth. …The crow is representing a human perspective looking down this long road at the pollution.”  The student has used perspective to draw our attention to the factory that's releasing the smoke into the air. And the crow seems reflective. Gazing, watching, and wondering how this impacts him. I really liked the contrast of nature, and the concrete breaks and the strong lines of the image around it. I thought this was a powerful piece, and showed a lot of commitment to the theme. He chose smoke to do this monochromatic piece with shades, everything from white to very dark blacks, and mostly shades of gray.

Lois 

I think one of the things that interests me is the way this kid used material. One of the Studio Habits of Mind is to develop craft, and he really used the technique of perspective. It's like that crow is on the line of the perspective aiming right for the smokestacks. This crow is in the foreground and is dark and is facing away. It's really interesting how this kid was able to use technique to express something very personal. I think a really powerful thing about the arts is that, however much technique the kids have, students can use it to say what they want to say. Some students don't have very much technique yet, but still the expression is very, very rich. 

Louise

In this series we've been talking a lot about curriculum development, and how who decides and who decides what is being taught and learned.  In this one piece, it seems to me, there's so much curriculum opportunity on the topic of progress.  What is progress? When I was a child, General Electric had a logo, ‘Progress is our Business”. It's a real question, what is progress as we are going forward? When we have exhibitions of student work, often it is a culminating event. But it's also the beginning.  That’s the case with Lois’s Sea Rise Mural event at Umana elementary school in Boston to celebrate the completed mural. These events are opportunities to ask young people about the impact of artmaking and art viewing on their lives going forward. It is an opportunity for curriculum development because there are so many generative next places to go.

Lois 

There's this one piece, by a 10th grader in Timpanogos High School, of a cherry tree on a little island reflected in the water. The artist says, “You know, cherry blossoms connect me with me by reminding me that there's always a chance to start over and do better than the last time.” This makes me sad, because I do think that that's true, and that's something we really want kids to know. It's a very important piece about making art. At the same time, there is a chance that if we don't pay attention to what's going on with climate change, if we don't get this conversation out there and get everybody talking about it, that we may be, for the first time at a place where human beings don't have a chance to start over and do better. 

And there's a piece by an anonymous student in eighth grade. This is one where the technique is crude.  It's gradations of color, pinks, and purples and reds in the top, and the bottom is sort of a greenish yellow. It's called ‘Gold Sand Sunset’. The artist writes, “The beauty of the sand and loneliness, the world coming undone. The beauty of acceptance and broken things. I know what it's like to be broken. So do you. If you don't, you will soon because that's life. You can love and laugh too.” I look at these kids trying to make sense, and trying to live their lives trying to move through adolescence in the way that they need to. I'm reading a book by Elena Ferrante called The Lying Lives of Adults. It's from the perspective of an adolescent. Her family is a mess. They're really trying, and she's really trying to make sense of who she's going to become in the midst of all this broken stuff. I think we shy away sometimes from letting kids talk about the hard stuff because we want them to be beautiful and wise and there's a lot of hard stuff.  I think we have to be courageous about meeting young people where they are and sometimes they are in very deep, dark, hard places.

Cally 

We want them to be unburdened. The children are burdened with the task of growing up, and the emotional lessons are hard and family relationships are hard, and friends are hard, and all those things you have to learn are hard. Some people have supportive environments and others have more challenging environments. I wonder how we choose which burdens are for their growth and what we want to unburden them with. So often, we protect young people from things that that they don't need protection from, while they are dealing with things that they definitely need protection from.  That idea of burdened and unburdened, I find interesting.

Lois 

Trena talked about going to the kids and asking them where they are, what they know, what they think, what they care about.  I think that's the answer. We don't have to unburden them, we just have to go and be present to them where they are.

Heather 

Cally and I attended an instructional leadership conference last week and one of the speakers spoke about the importance of adults in helping children with social emotional resilience and well being. The speaker encouraged adults to model the way that we sometimes have to express emotions and sometimes we have to tame them. Both are important. The role of adults in helping model that coregulation is so important. One of the entries in this competition was submitted by one of my dear friends who has been that adult for her son his entire life.  I saw her post something on social media and I said, you have to share this with the world. It is so beautiful. In her post, she said they knew her son was different from a young age.  He has needed support at school for various learning struggles. He has known he's not like the other students. They gave him the lead role of Horton, the elephant, in Seussical, the musical. His mother recorded him sitting on the box on stage singing Horton's song, which is so beautiful. It's all about being alone in the universe, and how Horton feels so alone and so different. This child probably really, really feels that way. But you would have no idea the struggles that this child has endured by the beautiful musical performance that he gives. He didn't submit it himself. His mom submitted it, and his mom is honoring and sharing his work. She's out there making sure everybody's voting for him today.

I would probably say this about so many of the contributing artists. But it's so amazing the way his mother and his father and his family and his teachers have been there for this boy. They really know him. They know where he shines when singing; he's alone in the universe, but he is the star of the stage.

Lois 

Beautiful. 

What does adding earth to the competition title bring out? I don't know what proportion of the kids just still did the impact of the arts in their lives. For many it was still straight social emotional learning. I found that I really wanted to look at the ones about earth. There were some that were about earth like, “I like to fish and so I made a fish.” 

There were some that were really digging into like the centipede one.  So this is by an 11th grader at the Cedar Valley School. It's a vertical canvas with this statement by the artist:

”The world is screaming and we don't even hear it. I created this painting as a way to make people open their eyes and see the world burning and life dying right in front of us. The meaning behind this artwork is a centipede symbolizing the world, earth, nature etc. As you can see, it is being stitched together with pins on the legs taped down, symbolizing how more and more buildings are being put on top of the earth and eventually the earth is covered in concrete, one building after another, to the point where we have fake grass. How do I use my art to make the earth a better place? Well, there's a difference between telling a person and showing them.  Showing a person through art gives it a very emotional point of view, and is different from telling a person that the world's dying. My process of creating this work was by starting to gesso my board and let that dry. Then I started sketching my design with the centipede pin cushion sewing needles. Next, I taped down the areas I didn't want to paint on, so it would be easier to paint on. Then I spray painted, trying to make it look like a spray painted table.  Then I started throwing paint on: mixing, blending and shading, etc.  I finished it with a layer of blue glitter on just the centipede, and then made some rearrangement, adding a few things here and there.”

Wow. This statement of how that kid was using art to make an impact with his personal feelings, knowledge, and intention was pretty stunning.

Louise

I’m not sure it matters how many children artists are making works about the earth, when everyone has the opportunity to benefit from what individuals choose to make work about: the earth, art, or life. I think a beautiful thing about this exhibition is that it isn't a performance just for the purpose of culminating your project, but it is seeing all of the children's interests and concerns in deeper ways.  This exhibition is building community knowledge and understanding. It's individual social and emotional learning and it's community, social and emotional learning as well.

Lois 

The inclusion is what's so easy to do with the arts if you allow it, like this one by Ruben Weeks. He is a second grader who says, “I drew this for my cousin Madeline's birthday.  She's turning 12. She loves bunnies.  Through my pictures I can show that I know her and love her. And it's a bunny with all of this scrawled green around it. That is the grass that the bunny lives in.”

This is Ruben’s true heart and deep thinking. It's about love.

Heather

That's his wisdom for sure. Let’s summarize what we've learned in this series. Something that I see in this competition, that I've seen through all of our conversations in this series, is this need to help students and children connect with nature.  I think the challenge that we've addressed in this series is how do we help children maintain their love for the earth as they go into adulthood.  So many of us are sitting at desks, working in business, working in education, working in any discipline, and it often requires keeping us from nature.  Some jobs really get us  into nature, and that’s great. But how do we help children continue to want to make connections to art and the earth because they love it so much into adulthood?

Lois 

These children are so lucky because they live in Utah, which is some of the most beautiful country in the entire world. They can walk out their door and be in a heavenly environment. There are a lot of kids who are not anywhere near a heavenly environment. They are in urban jungles. There's still nature there, but you really have to look for it. It's not as easy as going out and wandering through the grass to find the animals and the beautiful natural world.

Louise 

Yes. I think one of the things that I've been learning from this series is something that the IDEAL facilitators and the Our Changing Planet project eloquently spoke to. Begin wherever you are, with whatever you have. Remember that they talked about when COVID hit, and everyone had to work online and be in their homes?  They thought their professional development was doomed. But then they discovered that when teachers were in their living room, they could look out their window. Children’s bodies are part of nature.  There are many ways to connect children to what they have, and what they don't have. Also, we're lucky to have the space of the internet and videos, where we can connect children to each other and to the world. 

Lois

Yes, and we're unlucky because we have this barrier, which is that many schools are using scripted curriculum and minimizing the teacher and the student relationship. How does the teacher go to where a student is when they're mandated to be on page 11, paragraph three, today, and tomorrow, they're mandated to be on page 12, paragraph four?  The barriers of schooling are really huge, and the behemoth of this system of schooling and how it has coalesced around tightening down with rules and steps and limitations and constraints is daunting. Let the people be people. Let them be who they are. Let them come together and find what they're curious about and start figuring that out. It's a human made problem that made the schools like this, and we can remake them. 

Louise

As we're wrapping this up, I’m thinking about the episode about Our Changing Planet. We were all remarking on how important that project is and how it really seems to be working well, and we were asking, “What is it that makes this so special?”  I've been thinking about it and I think it really is that idea of frameworks. Lois, you brought those frameworks to us in Alameda County that have resulted in the IDEAL and Our Changing Planet project, that you've brought to people all over the world. Those frameworks are a foundation base. Those frameworks are learning from the experience of teachers who are really doing a good job of meeting young people where they are, using experts, using disciplinary resources, and making it relevant to children who are either in nature rich places or in concrete jungles. I think that that's such an important thing. The other thing that really stands out to me is Paul Hawken's book, Regeneration, Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation.  It is a hope and a challenge that  has a lot of wisdom in it.  I think its greatest wisdom is that this is about everybody. This isn't about just teachers, this isn't just about politicians, this isn't just about administrators. It's about everyone.

It's about every career. When young people grow up, and they go into jobs, where they are tied to desks… every single position needs to be asking themselves, “How is what I'm doing every day, in school, in my job, either contributing to the current suicidal path that we're on with our environment, or really rethinking and contributing to how we need to do things differently?”

To me, those are the two biggest things. I think educators need those frameworks.  I think we need to accept that this is everybody's issue. We need everyone, the indigenous wisdom, the experts, the children's new knowledge, all of it!

Lois 

And we, as examples, just need to keep talking about it. We need to talk about it to everybody. It needs to be a pyramid scheme. It needs to be a cascade.The only way to get everybody involved is to keep the conversation going.  I do think that art does that. Figuring out how to keep everybody in the conversation, regardless of where they're starting from.

Cally

One of our ninth grade artists in the contest summarized it this way,

 “I painted an hourglass, with trash in the top and the earth in the bottom. I wondered, how can the arts heal the earth? I think that the arts heal the earth by spreading awareness to others about what is happening and what can be done to save our planet. People always say it is a problem for the next generation, but the truth is that the time is now.”

Heather

Beautiful.

Lois

There’s some child wisdom.

• Arts for Life Utah M’art’ch Madness Student Art Competition: Earth, Art, Life

• CHLLpodcast.com
• CHLL on Instagram
• CHLL on Facebook

Subscribe on apple, spotify, pandora, amazon, google

The Sea Level Rise Mural Project at Umana School in Boston is an offshoot of another research project on extreme weather that Lois has been involved with.  It has been funded by the National Science Foundation for the past four years. This school year Lois has been working in a Spanish bilingual public school in Boston, called Umana elementary school. It's built on land that is 10 inches above the current mean high high tide.  The main high high tide is what we usually call sea level. The school is right on Boston Harbor but the kids don't have any access to the harbor because it's fenced away, and there's weeds and industrial garbage beyond the fence. Lois worked with the art teacher and the fifth through eighth grade students to make a clay tile mural about sea level rise.  Many of them are recent immigrants to Boston with varied documentation status.  Many are Spanish only speakers. 

The playgrounds at Umana have already flooded at 10 inches, and they're going to continue flooding.  By 2030 it's going to be 14 inches, by 2050 It's going to be 33 inches, and by 2070 it’s supposed to be 55 inches.  These might be low estimates.  The purpose of the project is to raise community awareness about the impact of sea level rise on this community, and help them to understand nature based solutions to sea level rise.  We are making murals that show the animal habitat in the area, and potential adaptations to address the flooding.  For example, structures can be elevated, or structures can be built to block the wave action. Or marshes can be created to absorb water. The  hope is that these murals will educate and motivate community planning. 

Lois describes her state of disequilibrium as she embarks on a project out of her expertise as a teacher and a researcher.  Lois had to learn from others how to design and site a mural.  She had to work with new materials and collaborate with others that could fire the 900 discreet tiles painted by students, and then install them on interior walls at the school.   Lois was challenged to learn a lot quickly about what constitutes or threatens healthy sea life in Boston Harbor, and what is predicted to happen to sea life with sea level rise. Lois worried about what students were actually learning as they painted their individual tiles, and how her arts education values of student choice, revision, joy, personal expression, problem solving, engagement, connection, commitment, imagination, reflection, playfulness, and close observation were, or were not, being attended to in this project.

Lois describes how she has enjoyed the collaboration with the art teacher, and getting to know the East Boston community.  She appreciates the public visual permanence of the information that is expressed in the mural, which can be a platform for future learning. But what worries her about the project is whether the kids learned enough about sea level rise and the importance of biodiversity. . I don't know if they did. I don't know if they know why biodiversity matters. Were the students engaged enough and do they see the personal relevance? Lois asks, what makes a good enough project in climate education?

Louise

I applaud you and your colleagues for jumping in, Lois. I think about Trena and Constance in our last episode, who surveyed the students of the teachers they were working with, and found out that kids were thinking about climate change all the time. They were wondering why adults aren't doing more. I can't imagine that that's so different for the children in Boston at Umana Elementary School. It is so great that they are having the opportunity to paint tiles with the local sea life, and that their learning is right there surrounding their school. These students see adults, you and your colleagues, as you put the panels together, and they see that you are doing something.  I imagine they see that this is helping them and their families to understand how climate change is going to change their local environment.  I imagine the kids must be really grateful that that's happening. I just can't imagine that it isn't very reassuring for children to see this project happening. I can't imagine that, because it will be a permanent piece at the school site, that it won’t inspire more collaborations and new curriculum about climate change in East Boston and the world.  What a gift! 

Heather  

Amazing educators, artists, like yourself, Lois, do good enough projects.  What makes a good enough project is having an excellent art educator in a system of schooling that is not conducive to the kind of artmaking that they're used to. When I was in second grade my whole extended family took several vacations to Yellowstone National Park. I was so enthusiastic about what I experienced that my second grade teacher gave me an opportunity to lead an art project for my classmates. This is a story of Heather's character as a curriculum designer from a very young age! I really wanted all the students in my classroom to feel and know what I knew about mud pots from Yellowstone National Park, because I remember standing by these muddy sulfur gray, gooey pots that would bubble up, and it felt like something from the Jurassic period. My imagination was just exploding. I got the idea to provide my classmates with coffee filters that they could paint gray, to simulate the mud pots. Then I told the whole class everything I had learned about mud pots in my Junior Ranger program. It was a profoundly meaningful experience for me. Made possible with coffee filters, gray paint, and a second grade teacher who was willing to take a risk on a t year old’s idea.  For me, it was a rich  experience that connected me to a love of the land and the Earth.

Lois Hetland 

You had a powerful experience and you wanted to share it and you were allowed to come up with a way to share it with other people. Your story demonstrates how important the idea of student choice and agency is in schooling. I worry that in this project there might not have been enough choice.  So much of it was designed by adults. 

Louise Music   

But it's just the beginning, Lois. When listening to Heather, I am reminded of a video on You Tube where Neil deGrasse Tyson is talking to a six year old about the meaning of life. It’s a must see.  Neil de Grasse Tyson explains to the child that the meaning of life is always revealing itself to us. Herecommends to the child that the most important thing to do is to go out into nature. He recommends the child pull things up out of the ground, smell them, take them apart, and look at how they're connected to each other. Basically, his best advice to this six year old is to do some version of what Heather was doing with her second grade classroom.  The advice from the astro-physicist is experiment!  Look at things that you've experienced, and think about what they're like and do something with it. Don't be afraid to explore. And maybe that's good advice for teachers.  Maybe what we need to be saying to teachers is, explore!  Do what Lois did.  Come up with an idea and do it even if you are not sure how it will turn out.  Then think about how well it went. Ask your students, “how did that go? What was confusing?” And then, with their input, begin again.

Cally Flox 

I think it's important to remember that we're educators.  We want to assess what the kids do. We want to check our success. But a project like this isn't about our success. And the most important things we learn in life can't be assessed or measured in these ways. 

So Louise just made it really simple. Ask the kids, what did you think? How did that feel, and then begin again. If you put your heart and soul into something, and you do something really wonderful, and then you reflect on it, and you begin again, that's good enough. 

Lois Hetland  

I think what still worries me is that this project was too product focused.  It was about making a mural, and that maybe a lot of the process of making the mural got lost. 

Cally Flox   

The beauty of your project, Lois, is that it has a permanence that is going to be there over time.  The students have time to engage their families, their friends, and for more conversations.  There's a new process being born because the product is in place. The students have the opportunity to go to that wall every day.  They will say, “I made this tile. What do I remember about making this tile? What do I want to tell somebody about this tile?”  Your project, Lois, is just beginning.

Louise Music 

Yes, Cally. I don't think we can underestimate the power of conversation. That's why we do this podcast. Good conversations need to start in our classrooms. We need to listen to children. I think we all know and have experienced the great promise of arts in our classrooms and schools. The arts products provide so many multiple ways for us to see what's going on in students’ hearts and minds.

Heather

I want to talk about the studio structures, because you haven't got into the exhibition part of this project yet, right Lois? The gallery showcase of student work, or the dance or music performance, at the end of a learning experience are rich opportunities to launch next steps.

Cally Flox  

Let's clarify studio structures, because that's an important teaching pedagogy from Lois’ book Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Arts Education. Lois and her colleagues analyzed visual arts classrooms and found four structures that work in a studio setting, that we have found also work across the performing arts. One is a lecture demonstration: you give the kids the information and the background and the skills they need to do the project. The next one is: students at work. That's where students spend most of their time in great classrooms learning and applying skills and technique. Then critique and reflection. Then the last studio structure is performance or exhibition: where student work is shared in a culminating way.

Heather  

I have seen what one night on stage for two hours does for the learning of my students. In the weeks after their performance students are best friends.  They want to talk to me and show me dance videos just because of this performance experience we have had together. I would anticipate some more satisfaction from your project Lois as a result of the community coming together to view and reflect upon the final murals. 

Lois Hetland  

I do hope that it catalyzes something good for the future of these students and their community. 

Let's say that I don't think I did everything that I wish I'd been able to do in this project. But it really is important. And there really will be some big things that come out of it. So everything didn't go perfectly or work out the way I wanted it to. That's the nature of first things and collaborations. I hope other teachers understand that it's worth taking a risk.  Even if you really don't know how to do it, just dive in there and start figuring it out. There are lots of resources out there . There are people who will help you.  The kids will help you figure it out.

• Photos of the Umana Sea Level Rise Mural
• Article about the Umana Sea Level Rise Mural
• Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Arts Education
• Neil de Grasse Tyson Talks With a Six-Year Old About the Meaning of Life

• CHLLpodcast.com
• CHLL on Instagram
• CHLL on Facebook

Subscribe on apple, spotify, pandora, amazon, google

Lois shares a video created by the directors of Our Changing Planet, a professional development program that supports teachers' understanding of the environment in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.  The video features the voices of teachers who have participated in Our Changing Planet and tell how it has impacted them in their personal and professional practice.  Our Changing Plant is a project of IDEAL (Integrated Design for Education, the Arts and Leadership) that  introduces teachers to artists and scientists currently working on environmental projects.  The project provides the teachers with time to collaborate with artists, scientists and each other. 

This is a cohort of 40 teachers who have been teaching and learning through arts integration, exploring the climate crisis across the whole curriculum for four years. The CHLL group had listened to an interview, prior to this episode, that Louise had with two of the founders and facilitators for the Our Changing Planet.  Constance Moore and Trena Noval shared how this project honors teacher professionalism and experience, while opening their practice to new dimensions that map onto student interest and needs.  

The past three years have just been so demoralizing for teachers who are expected to always do everything and educate everybody, and had to emergency learn zoom and teach online. But these teachers actually found their passion during the pandemic and relied on this professional development experience to keep them going - even as it required extra time and work on their parts. The facilitators of Our Changing Planet were surprised by the commitment and enthusiasm of teachers to continue the work during the  pandemic lockdown when they were already online so much of the day.  According to Constance and Trena, the teachers locked hands and said to themselves, “We are in a crisis. This work is about facing this crisis, and our climate crisis, together.”  The facilitators met teachers exactly where they were at.  They asked teachers who were sitting at their laptops, in their houses, to look out their windows and observe their environment. Whether it's the birds in the backyard, or the trees along the front street, teachers were encouraged to get curious.  The opportunity to learn about what is in each teacher’s world, and to consider and situate learning around what's important to teachers and their students has been a foundational aspect of what has made this program successful. 

Teachers are clear about the basic skills kids need to learn.  By teaching literacy and math skills through the lens of researching the natural world around them, students are motivated to write more and practice more.  When students are developing history and science knowledge in a concerted effort to understand present day problems in local communities, they engage more deeply.  When the content is really important to the teachers and the students at the time, it becomes the driver to read, to write, and to apply knowledge in math, science and history. Teachers and students want to build their skills, because the content is of interest and relevance.

Heather

I was impressed that the topic of conversation and exploration was always connected to what teachers were interested in.  The facilitators were not there to execute a curriculum that was designed as the guide for the teacher experience. Instead the facilitators paid close attention so that they could pivot to what teachers are interested in, and to what's going on in the world.

Lois

They also drew on scientists and artists, who are working on climate change in all sorts of amazing ways. Teachers watched videos of these experts talking about their work, and the  teachers would watch and weep because it was so moving and poignant. And so moving. 

Cally

This project is an important reminder that learning happens inside of relationships. Relationships are the key to any kind of learning. These teachers come together in a crisis. They teach on zoom all day and then they come to a zoom meeting at night just to be with their own colleagues to feel some inspiration, and to belong somewhere. It actually reduces their stress they're dealing with at the time instead of increasing it. They bond together. Then they take the information out to their students. It's created in relationship, therefore it's disseminated in relationship. Then the relationships grew, and someone knew somebody at Alcatraz island  and ideas for the program got bigger. These incredible connections are built. Now the students are going on a field trip to Alcatraz to look at the birds that migrate there. I listened to them describe the authentic growth of the people who got involved. It grew from the ground up. That's one of the most important things in education is that we allow the human aspect of who people are and how they learn to emerge through relationships with natural connections and authentic learning, as opposed to here's a program and the system.

I think this is how all education should be, because it's people centered, and it's expressive. Every learner connects authentically. Every teacher connects authentically. 

Lois

Many people are left with scripted curriculum, and it's done in the name of equity which is just amazing to me. In this project, they started out by talking to the students and asking what they think and know and feel about climate change.  The kids had all sorts of ideas and questions. One of the big questions was, why aren't adults doing anything about this?  They would share an idea and wonder why adults don’t do that? I think it was this beautiful amalgamation of relationships over a long period of time between the county office of education’s arts initiative, the leadership of these various districts, and teachers getting involved and involving their students. And anyway, it was a really nice coming together and our changing planet has really built on all of that. So Cally, I think you're exactly right. It's really fundamentally about relationships. Because otherwise, how does one gain entry? How do you progress if your principal is thinking  you're supposed to be working on the standards and preparing for the high stakes tests in reading and math. 

The teachers interact with each other and find resources for the students to interact with each other.  When they spoke to the kids, they discovered climate change was on their minds.I think the notion that these kids are too little, or it's too scary, or it's too frightening is false. We need to talk more to kids, meet them where they are, and get them to be good observers.  The center of inquiry is observing. 

Louise

Our Changing Planet is spreading. The Alameda County Office of Education, serving 18 school districts, has contracted with IDEAL to do more professional development for more people. In California, there is a statewide Environmental Literacy Initiative that IDEAL is connecting with. It’s important to follow these relationships as well: from the city of Alameda, to 18 more school districts across Alameda County, to a statewide Environmental Education Initiative, to other projects that are happening all across the country.  It's really person to person, talking about what matters. The teachers and the facilitators were so surprised to see how much climate change was already on children's minds. Of course! Children drive around in their parents cars, and they're hearing about extreme weather and reports on climate change on the news.  They're looking out their windows and seeing flooding and scary weather and hearing adults talking about things. Our children need the chance to learn what climate change is about and that actually they can have a role. That's providing a sense of purpose and agency to not only the students, but the teachers as well. 

• Integrated Design for Education, the Arts and Leadership - IDEAL
• Our Changing Planet
• California Environmental Education Initiative

• CHLLpodcast.com
• CHLL on Instagram
• CHLL on Facebook

Subscribe on apple, spotify, pandora, amazon, google

In our culture, talking about the weather is considered small talk and unimportant. And yet, it's so much a part of our lives. Maybe the weather isn't small talk. Maybe it needs to become central to our conversations because it is central to our lives. One of the things we may need to do is integrate our schooling with our lives. The BYU Arts Partnership’s Native American curriculum initiative is one place where this is really happening.  It was started in 2017 in an effort to improve teacher professional learning curriculum by removing culturally insensitive or stereotypical content. 

The initiative began with a question to the eight sovereign nations in Utah, “What do you want the children of Utah to know about your tribe?” Resoundingly, all of the tribes said that they wanted the children of Utah to know, “We are still here.”  The native tribes feel invisible.  Lesson plans were created in collaboration with the tribes, and bear the tribal seal of approval on them.  Working with sovereign nations is all about relationships, and honoring the timeframe. 

One of the common threads in these lesson plans is that Native Americans have a kinship with the earth. They see everything is connected. and this kinship worldview says that what happens to the trees happens to us, and how we respect the animals and how we live in harmony. We're all connected. We're connected to the weather. There's a reason and purpose in that web of life. At last summer’s conference, Native artists told the story of their life. As they shared their stories, everyone became more aware and sensitive and human together. Everyone's stories emerged as relevant and powerful. 

After the conference, a group of teachers went to Capitol Reef National Park to learn about how to bring the environment to children. Ben Abbott, a professor at BYU of ecosystem ecology took the teachers out into the wilderness to look at the artifacts from indigenous people hundreds of years ago. Going into the desert with this environmental scientist who studies global issues and permafrost and how the world operates brought such hope for this planet, and helped teachers fall in love with the planet again. Teachers can't teach the Native American lesson plans, until they understand sustainable living and fall in love with the planet. How do we help children fall in love with nature and the outside world as part of schooling? We must bridge the gap between what's happening in schools and what's happening in life.  Learning from Native American tribes and spending time in nature provides teachers the experiences to connect the curriculum and science to make it more relevant for kids. There are many examples of this happening that are ready to be shared more broadly.

Louise

I love this description of what teachers are doing.  They're taking children out into nature and using the arts to help them, look, see, express and connect. But what must happen first is what the tribes said:  an acknowledgement that we are here.  Children need that too. I am here and I have a story. And I think that's a big missing piece in school. We get so focused on the curriculum, and the curriculum will emerge when the teachers and the children show up authentically.  When we are present, there is the opportunity for potential to manifest. But when we are not present, the opportunity for potential and possibilities to manifest actually collapses. 

Lois 

Four Arrows is a 76 year old Native American thinker and writer who says that he is optimistic  because he thinks optimism is about living in the present, and letting go of outcomes. I think it's fascinating to look at the lineage of Native Americans thinking which has been so diminished in our contemporary consciousness, to the point of it almost being non-existent, or if it does exist, it's like magical thinking or New Age. The truth is, this is human thinking. I keep thinking of Joanna Macy saying that this is the third turning, with agriculture being the first and the Industrial Revolution being the second, and then this being the third. If human beings get this one figured out it's going to be a real change in human consciousness. 

Indigenous Wisdom Is An Essential Resource to the Present

Heather

One of the things that Ben Abbott, scientist and professor at BYU tells us is that scientists will describe research on water and say, water research is young. We've only had two or 300 years to really research what we know about water.  They are talking about the Anthropocene or this contemporary time as the only time that we have presently studied water and what we know about water.  But Ben Abbott reminds us indigenous people have studied, worked with, understood, and been in relationship with water for way longer than present research or empirical study in the way that we've adopted in this contemporary age. We have so much more information if we turn to the experience of indigenous people.

Cally

The teachers who work with us in our programs are often describing how they're healed through bringing the arts into their life. Truly, if we're not healing each other, as we live together on the planet, if we're not creating systems that sustain us and sustain each other, we're not going to sustain humanity on this planet. At the BYU Arts Partnership we have made a conscious effort to be present and responsive and to serve with love and distinction.  The 1000s of years worth of information that we can gather from our indigenous people is so valuable. The people who show up to be with us come with their background knowledge, their information, their history, and we have to honor and be present with all of it. 

Lois

I've just started the book, The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. David Graber was an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and Wengrow is a comparative archaeologist who studied Africa and the Middle East at University College London, and is also a visiting professor at NYU.  The Dawn of Everything is a reinterpretation of the historical timeline. The point they're making is that the story that hunter gatherers were small roving bands, and people settled and developed agriculture and civilization  is such a simplistic story. We need to move beyond it to see the whole potential of human possibilities. The first part I'm reading is about the indigenous critique. It's fascinating to me, because I've known that Benjamin Franklin went to the Iroquois Confederacy, and got ideas about democracy that influenced our Constitution, for 30 years. But I did not know that there was this thing that's called the indigenous critique.  Indigenous people organize their communities through conversation, and everyone has a voice in a non-hierarchical conversation. They were critical of the Europeans, the French, the English and the Spanish, because they had money. Because money led to power. Because nobody was free. Everybody was beholden to the hierarchy of power and money.

These powerful monarchs in the Native American critique claimed that they were free because they can all sit and talk to each other.  Nobody can be compelled to do anything. They didn't have prisons, or judges. What they had was conversation. This guy, LeHaunt, recorded the conversations with this one indigenous diplomat, who was regarded by everybody as an amazing interlocutor.  This guy could talk his way in and out of anything. Even though the native people did not valorize individuals, this guy rose in European minds. He lived in Paris for six years and this guy, LeHaunt, wrote a book about conversations with this fellow. It was in the 1600s, in the 17th century, and the book was widely read all across Europe. And it influenced the Enlightenment philosophers like Locke, and Rousseau. So all of these ideas that we think of as Enlightenment ideas about equity and equality, and democracy and human nature, can be tied directly to these Native American ideas. And yet again, we eclipsed them.  Who knows about that? I'm so glad for this book. 

Cally

When we made our agreement with the Paiute Tribe, to create their lesson plans, one of the things they requested was to see the lesson plans taught in a classroom before they approved them. So we traveled down to Cedar City where many of the Paiute children attend school.  Probably 20 to 25 of the leadership of the Paiute nation came to observe and watch. They were so inspired to watch these lesson plans unfold. Many of the children who were Native American had not been taught about their culture, because their parents and grandparents came through the boarding school era, when you kept secret that you are a Native American. So in their own culture, they don't know when to celebrate their Native American culture, and when it's a shameful thing, because that's what historical trauma does. Some of the Caucasian students did not realize that their friends were Native American, and some Native American children who were learning about their culture for the first time.  It was remarkably healing because it was so relevant to that community.

Heather

I think that indigenous people, and certainly native communities in our area, have great wisdom on how to deal with overwhelmingly difficult challenges. We have a partnership with the northwestern band of the Shoshone, and they've shared with us about the massacre of all their people with only 30 to 40 people of their community left.  But they are still here today. What lessons can we learn from them to have only 30 to 40 people of your population left, but to continue to exist and be resilient, moving forward?

Cally

The Shoshone massacre was the largest massacre of Native American lives in US history. Every year they have a commemoration ceremony on the land. They now own the land where that massacre happened for the very first time in history. We were able to film their ceremony. They tell the story. They drum and pray and honor the ancestors and the tragedy that happened. One man stood at the end of the ceremony and sang his song, we must all forgive but we cannot forget. The spirits of our dead are here with us today. And as he sang that song, the healing that happens was just palpable: the resilience that we can survive. One of the lessons we learned from them is how to survive. The first thing the Shoshone are going to do with the land is to restore it to its original ecosystem. This is a $2 million project funded by a grant they obtained to restore the land. They will put an interpretive center on that land so that passersby can visit the interpretive center and tell their story that demonstrates resilience and helps people understand the history of the United States. We've learned in the BYU Arts Partnership that the arts can tell hard stories. 

• BYU ARTS Partnership Native American Curriculum Initiative
• On Indigenous Voices and Restoring the Kinship Worldview - A Conversation with Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez
• The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow

• CHLLpodcast.com
• CHLL on Instagram
• CHLL on Facebook

Subscribe on apple, spotify, pandora, amazon, google

Louise interviewed her cousin Michael, a PE teacher at Paradise Intermediate School about the lasting impact of the November 2018 Camp Fire that devastated their community. Paradise is a rural town of 10,000 people in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, that along with many more communities up and down this state, have been ravaged by wildfires due to a 20 year drought.

On the evening of November 7, Michael was driving to his home in Chico from his long day of teaching in Paradise, he listened to the news on the radio predicting very high winds, under dry and hot weather conditions. The news warned that the gas and electric company, PG&E, might be forced to turn the power off to customers, and that the community should expect rolling black outs.  But, unfortunately, PG&E did not make the decision to turn off the electricity in a timely way, and so the next morning, as Michael got in his truck and returned from his home in Chico back to the town of Paradise where he teaches, he was looking at a huge plume of smokein front of him and thought, “This is not good.” 

As he made the twenty minute drive, he got a call from his teaching partner saying, “Well, we might have to do PE in the gymnasium today because of the smoke.” Michael, who had the perspective of the ever-growing plume of black smoke before him, thinks,”We're not going to be teaching PE in the gym. We're going to have to close school for the day!”

When Michael arrives at school he tells his colleagues that school needs to be canceled for the day, and that they need to send everybody home. But at the same time, busloads of students from other schools are being dropped off, because they are already evacuating hundreds of children from other schools to come to Paradise Intermediate School as an evacuation center. 

Michael and his colleagues decide to direct all students to the gymnasium where they are occupied with basketballs and various activities to keep them occupied while the teachers figure  out what to do next. Michael stood at the doors to the gymnasium to direct anxious parents coming to collect their kids. He described to Louise how he learned the enormity of what was going on outside the gymnasium walls.  There were the explosive noises and the sounds of pelting rain.  Parents reported driving through bumper traffic, as propane tanks exploded at homes along the road, and black embers pelted the roofs of cars and houses.  It was now 9:00 in the morning but it was pitch black outside due to the blanket of thick smoke that was choking the area.  

While the news of the severity and danger of what was going on outside of the gymnasium was clear, teachers were not getting information on what they should do. As they began to have discussion about making a next steps plan, a police officer from nearby Oroville City strode into the gymnasium and announced, “Everyone needs to get out. Now! Get into any car.  Forget about seat belts.  Just jam into cars and leave now.  There is no time.” People immediately began to comply.  

There are just three, maybe four routes, out of the town, which was one of the big problems. So people got stuck in congested traffic, just sitting there with six or more children in the car and fires raging on either side of the road.  It was terrifying, and Michael, just like everyone else in the town of Paradise, most likely, that day wondered,“Is this the day I will die?”  

85 people did lose their lives that day, and 19,000 homes, businesses and structures were destroyed.  

In the days and weeks that followed, Michael and the teachers of the town of Paradise made calls to find out where families were staying and to connect them to resources.  After the winter holidays, school was reopened for students still in the area at an abandoned Orchard Supply Hardware store. They relocated to the previous site of Paradise high school in the fall of 2019, and then in spring of 2020, the COVID pandemic hit, and they were forced to pivot to a hybrid of teaching from home and online. It was two full years before they were able to return with their students to the Paradise Intermediate School.  

Many of the teachers also live in the town of Paradise, and lost their homes. People have had to deal with so much in terms of loss and trauma and death, and then, rebuilding their lives and rebuilding their school. The attention to relationships has been a really strong part.  Michael described that everyone: from the principal, to the superintendent, to his colleagues, to the parents, were generous and compassionate and caring.  The school culture has changed due to daily attention to the social, emotional and academic needs of the students.

When Louise asked if this natural disaster, brought on by a warming climate as a result of human actions, had influenced, shaped or changed their curriculum, Michael said it had not.   Michael’s seventh and eighth graders now were third graders when the Camp Fire occurred. He and his colleagues are concerned about the learning loss of the basic reading and math skills that they needed at that time. So Michael, a PE teacher, makes sure to incorporate math and literacy skill building into his PE classes and his social and emotional advisory times.

When Louise pushed a little further on whether the Camp Fire had been any kind of a teacher to Michael, his colleagues and his students, he said that they haven't incorporated it into the curriculum.  He also said that he wonders about the value of raising old fears. And so while it seemed to Louise that Michael was interested, or possibly thinking about how this experience could be a teaching tool for these young people who are growing into a world where these kinds of things happen, and increasingly happen, it isn't part of their curriculum now.

So Louise UPS’d a copy of the book Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation, a young adult novel titled Two Degrees, about middle school children who are dealing with wildfires and floods, and a children’s book titled Wild Child written by a father for his daughter about losing their home to wildfire to her cousin, Michael, to keep the conversation going.

Lois Hetland   

You know, as I hear this, and the same with the teachers Heather and Cally talked to, I keep thinking about the disconnect between what I see as an entry point to talk about this really, catastrophically important thing that's happening to all of us in the world. And then the reality of educators who are directly under threat.  I deeply appreciate how they take care of each other and themselves. But I continue to wonder, how do we catalyze people's interest in the bigger issue? And also, what is it we want people to understand?

Cally Flox   

I think that the timing really matters. What's that old saying…. “When the student is ready, the teacher appears?” I love that. I'm reflecting on what Michael said about wondering about the value of raising old fears. Why would we teach about this?

When is information damaging because it's reactivating fears that you're not ready to process? When is information helpful? You almost can't teach something until the children are asking.  How much time will go by before these people in this community can ask, what led to this problem? What contributed to this? Is there anything we can do to make this better in the future? It might be years, and it might be only months for some people. But the information can't be taught until the learners are ready.

Lois Hetland 

We don't know if the learners are ready if we're not asking them.  It's the educators responsibility to open the conversation up and then to go and meet the kids where they are.  If they're at a place of trauma, or overwhelm, or fear, then you meet them there. You can meet them at an information place.  You can meet them at an emotional place. You can meet them at a practical place. There are lots of different ways. It requires the educators to keep on opening the opportunities.

Cally Flox  

I want to clarify one thing.  Yes, educators have an opportunity to ask those questions. But these are also traumatized educators. And I'm curious if Michael mentioned, if they have school counselors.  Sometimes we expect more of teachers than they can do.  I'm not certain if I just lost my home in that community that I would be ready to lead those kinds of conversations very well. I think there is a professional role here.  After a school shooting or other trauma, we bring in professionals from the outside, who can read and regulate some of these emotions. These are big issues. Did they have any counseling for the students? 

Louise Music   

Unfortunately I did not ask that question and Michael didn’t specifically talk about that.  He talked about  their social and emotional learning programs. But that's not to say that there weren't counselors.  I imagine that there were. 

In my mind the big problem here is that we don't teach teachers to teach in constructivist classrooms. We don't teach teachers how to reveal or uncover what is going on with kids:what they're worried about, what they're excited about and what their interests are. Instead, we give teachers a curriculum to give to kids, and that's what teachers know how to do. We've talked before about how teachers need more deeper disciplinary knowledge.  I think it's great when they do, but I don't believe it's the most important thing.  I believe that there are so many disciplinary resources that teachers can draw upon and bring into their classroom. I think what teachers really need to be able to do is to set up classrooms where children have multiple ways to talk about what's going on with them, to make connections with literature, or math content, and to keep surfacing their ideas so that the teacher can see it and respond. That's the biggest thing that we don't teach teachers to do. How can a teacher respond to children at the right time, if they don't have multiple opportunities every day to see where kids are at given that they're all going to be in different places.

Heather  

That's what I loved about being a dance teacher. I felt that I got that opportunity every day because I created an environment where the children were making choices and their choices revealed to me what was important to them. So if they got to choose to make a dance, what were they making a dance about? Their uncle who didn't make it across the border, or their sister who had a miscarriage. And that was hard for me as a teacher because I didn't know anything about these topics myself. I was only 24 years old. 

I think that arts integrated constructivist classrooms provide a way for student experience to be expressed. In fact, one of the students from Paradise ended up in one of our school districts here in Utah.  The Granite School District had a visual art exhibit that I did some reporting on with my mom, who is a photographer. The student from Paradise had done a visual art piece on the forest on fire, and the art teacher was providing this student with processing and learning time. 

Lois Hetland  

I think that's a really interesting point, because it's about choice. When you set up your curriculum in a way that allows kids to make choices about their expressions, then you're going to find out what's on their minds.

Louise Music  

I think that's right, Lois. And I think that teachers are afraid that they won't have the answers, or they won't know what to do in an emotional or triggering situation. I think that that's where dealing with trauma and problems is something that kids need to be learning in school. I wonder how you would talk about that, Cally, because I think it goes to why Paul Hawken, in his book, has that whole section on agency.  What do you think?

Cally Flox  

Thank you for asking. I was talking to an ethnomusicologist in our fine arts college. At the University where I work we were talking about “what's the most important outcome?” He came up with the words creative agency. For the last number of years, I've participated in the trauma sensitive schools conference. This is a movement that has taken off. Their conference doubles in size every year, and people are really hungry for information about what we can do for traumatized children. 

There is no policy or practice that should be ever implemented as one size fits all.  We need to start creating cultures where talking about our mental health is welcome, embraced, appreciated, valued, supported, and not stigmatized. Until we embody learning with our full physical self with multi sensory experiences, our body doesn't have a way to process the trauma and move it through our nervous system. Teaching children to embrace their bodies, love their bodies, acknowledge their bodies and notice, reflect and respond to the feedback from our bodies is, I think, one of the first places we need to start in our education system. The way you describe constructivism just inspires my heart. And along with that, I think one of the second essential things is to teach people to embrace their physicality, and to self regulate through their entire brain and body connection.

Lois Hetland  

I'm thinking about this idea of multi generational conversations, which has been the big idea that we have been talking about. A school faculty is a multi generational group. You’ve got people in their 20s, their 30s, their 40s, their 50s, their 60s. If you get that group of people together, if somebody organizes that, you can do all sorts of things in those groups.  You can brainstorm, “what would it make sense to teach? What opportunities does the wildfire give us?” Well, it gives us opportunities to think about trauma, gives us opportunities to think about forests, gives us opportunities to think about weather, gives us opportunities to think about community, and networks of support gives us opportunities to think about resilience. I think to make faculties into those communities, we need to learn from everyone on a faculty.

Cally Flox

Yes, imagine a faculty where the experienced teachers share freely and liberally with the new teachers and the new teachers share freely, and that intergenerational piece, the connection from embodying our own selves and then embodying that community in that intergenerational way. That's why we started these conversations. You summarized the vision we had our first summer together when we went, “Oh, man, intergenerational communications, look what we're learning from each other.” Really well said, Lois.

When we started recording today, we had a slow start.  We discussed whether we were really ready to record today or not, and how emotionally the distractions in the world were making us late for this very session and distracting us in big ways in the world. And from this conversation, my hope is restored. I started the conversation discouraged and kind of worried about the world. And you have restored to me some hope. And I say thank you for that.

Heather Francis

I think we're doing the embodied processing that we just discussed. We  get to be in conversation on Zoom.  I get to see your bodies when you are talking about intergenerational connections.  Cally,in my mind I am Cally,  I embody Lois, I embody Louise.  We are a community and there are pieces of my like cellular being that I feel I've come from you because of the time we've spent online and in person. I'm grateful. 

• Fire In Paradise Documentary (40 Minutes) - Netflix
• Fire in Paradise - Frontline You Tube
• Granite School District Student reflecting on Paradise wildfire experience - HEATHER

• CHLLpodcast.com
• CHLL on Instagram
• CHLL on Facebook

Subscribe on apple, spotify, pandora, amazon, google

Hurricanes of Increasing Frequency and Intensity

Heather and Cally spoke with educators in Louisiana and Florida about hurricanes in the regions which are more frequent and more intense because of climate change.  They learned new things about experiencing hurricanes. For example, all the teachers have a hurricane closet and in April they stock it up with canned goods and toilet paper and flashlights and weather monitors. Then at Thanksgiving, they donate everything that wasn't used during the hurricane season, and then they stock up for the next year because it's just part of their lived experience. 

When asked about the impact on students, they were told that students get frustrated with missing school days because of hurricanes. They have to make the days up at the end of the school year.  Students are used to the hurricanes and complain that it’s, “...just hard rain! Why won't they let us go to school?” 

It's just not that big a deal, except for the fact that they evacuate their classrooms, because schools on the coasts that get hit the hardest are damaged and there are people who need shelter because their homes are gone. The students of teachers that Heather and Cally spoke with do not endure loss of property or life, but their school is now a shelter for the Red Cross. And that's really disruptive for teaching and learning.

Here's a news report about hurricane Ian that struck Florida in September 2022 resulting in 160 fatalities and the loss of power and homes, and 113 billion dollars in damages.

News Report: Hurricane Ian September 2022

Hello, DeSoto. County residents, students, parents, employees.  It’s sad to be at DeSoto County High School this morning observing the damage that we're going to see today. Our high school is going to be closed for approximately two months. And we're coming up with an emergency plan to make sure that we continue the education for our high school students, or other schools we're trying to get online. As soon as we can safely do that. We're going to have an industrial hygienist that will go to each school to make sure they're safe. And they're free from the mold that they're going to be good learning environments for students, safe places for employees to work in as soon as we can get them online. We're gonna change from a monthly update to a weekly update. Please look at the district Facebook site, the district website, we will use robocalls to communicate with you. We're gonna send some drone footage up for you to look at. So you can see the damage. At the high school we've got extensive water damage within the building, and to the roofs. We've got a crew that's on site right now that's been working. We had the Industrial Hygienist look at the schools in Charlotte County and DeSoto County. We've got a full time job ahead of us, and we ask you to be with us. We will keep you informed, and we're gonna work hard to get our schools open. We're gonna save this high school. And we look forward to getting our students back in school. Thank you so much for your patience. God bless each and every one of you in DeSoto. County and in the state of Florida. Thank you.

Teaching Hurricanes and Climate Science in Louisiana - or not? 

Teachers told Cally and Heather that the expectations for learning are to cover the curriculum. Weather may be a necessary disruption, but teachers are responsible to cover all the material and to get it done even with extreme climate disruptions. So Cally and Heather asked both teachers in Florida and Louisiana if they knew of any curriculum teaching about the climate crisis or human impact on the environment. They both said, “No, not that they are aware of. This is not a big topic in our area.” The science teacher that Cally and Heather  spoke with teaches a district mandated curriculum called amplify science, that she supplements with, what she believes to be, good science. 

So it's obvious from the news stories, from these interviews, that extreme weather and climate change are impacting learning. However, from these interviews, these teachers are not adapting the curriculum in their classrooms.

Lois Hetland  

I am thinking about teachers saying climate change is not a big topic in their area. Florida and Louisiana, are two places where the predictions from the scientists are that they are going to be underwater in a very few years, by 2050.  If we would face this and have a plan to retreat, we could get people out of these areas and resettled in areas where they could thrive. But it's not going to happen, because we're turning away from it. My friend, Bob Chen says, “Weather is the clothes you have and that you're wearing today. Climate is the clothes you have in your closet.” So basically, weather is daily-ness and climate is the-over-time.  It sounds like these teachers  are responding to the weather, but they're not responding to the-over-time. The fact is that looking at climate means more frequent storms, more heavier storms, more events, and more impact. And they're acting as if that doesn't exist. This idea of the scripted or mandated curriculum drives me crazy, because what I've heard is that people do it in the name of equity. Sure - let's make sure that nobody learns anything, because we're just going to parrot things back and forth. 

Cally Flox    

The science teacher we spoke with described the scripted curriculum, and then two supplemental curriculums.  Not one of them introduces climate change in any way in these three science curriculums. I asked the question about climate change in the curriculum, and her answer was, “Well, we must have different points of view on that topic.” I was stunned to realize that she did not accept climate change, and she is the science teacher. I love that her students are achieving really high on the standards, and that her colleagues are not bothering her about bringing in her own teaching ideas because her students are so high achieving.  She's in an area where there's a lot of pressure on achievement and the score the school gets.  But one thing she pointed out is her school doesn't get any credit for her work, because only math and reading count in the school's grade. That's what they're focused on. That's what they're looking at. That's what the parents value. So the relevance of what's happening to these students is not even part of their learning. 

Louise Music  

What we're talking about here is the teacher and the curriculum. We are talking about what the teacher cares about and what the teacher is doing. We are talking about the curriculum and how teachers decide, and what parents and school administrators value.  But what about the students? If their homes get flooded, if there's mud in their living rooms, this makes an impact on children's lives.  There's a lot of stress on families.  Children are not in a bubble.  If they’re not experiencing extreme weather directly in their own homes, they're  hearing about how the hurricanes and the dramatic rains in their cities aren't isolated events.  They're hearing about places where people are dying and losing their homes. It has to cause anxiety in our young people. If they're not having a chance to bring the concerns and questions that they have inside them to the fore, then they're not learning what they really need. Students can be learning things that they can regurgitate onto a standardized test, but the trauma to children and all human beings is what gets hidden.

Lois Hetland  

We have data from NASA with statistics that 97% or 100% of scientists who work on climatology understand that climate change is caused by human beings, the data is so clear. I think there are wonderful teachers out there who have been constrained by the information sources that  have the opinions of people they respect, who are not informed.

Is Climate Science Standards Based, or Student Centered?

Cally Flox  

I think we have to think about when and how people are teachable. Lois, one time you and I were talking about how to get teachers to be more connected to the world around them today. And your answer was to expose teachers to more contemporary artists to help them be more relevant, more empathetic and understanding of human nature and differences of opinions. The first thing that came to my mind is that these teachers are not using contemporary scientists. They are instead relying on standard curriculum written and scripted and handed to them, and not reading what contemporary scientists are warning us about. What a disconnect! 

So I went on our state website after the conversation and reviewed where Utah is on this issue. Utah has had climate change in the core standards in science for a very long time. 

Now, recently, there was a whole article on outrageous quotes of school board members talking about evolution and climate change. They absolutely were advocating that children never be taught that climate change is caused by people. Science educators said that there is too much evidence to the contrary and the climate science standards have been retained. But I wonder if in my own state, if I could find science teachers who choose not to present climate science in alignment with our own standards.

Heather Francis 

That's what's so interesting.  I went to Louisiana's website to see the standards, and I found on the Louisiana State Education website, an entire environmental literacy program. They have a commission for environmental literacy. And then I went and looked at the fifth grade science standards and there are two big key ideas about climate change and human impact on the environment. So the science teacher we spoke with has the standards, and she is making choices not to teach those things. The closest she got was telling us that her class talked about Katrina and how the levees broke, and that they do an activity to save their town from flooding. But it's just an exercise, rather than a deeper understanding of causes or implication for the future. 

Cally and I only spoke with this teacher for a half hour, and truly we would need to have more conversation to really understand.  There were a lot of things shared that Cally and I were in complete agreement with.  We have many shared values. One of them was this teacher’s wish that elementary school teachers be taken more seriously as people who understand content. Now we were having doubts, because well, you're a science teacher and you’re not teaching about climate change. She felt very strongly that elementary education is where you set the foundation for your life. And we believe that too. And there just would need to be a lot more conversations to really understand this teacher.

Lois Hetland

Yeah, I think one of the problems that I've experienced as an elementary teacher, and as you know, working with lots of elementary teachers, is the lack of disciplinary expertise. So many elementary teachers were never experts in any discipline. You know, they weren't science experts. They weren't literature experts. They weren't mathematics experts. We were generalists and so we relied on translations from the experts, through educationists, to us. I think that's a problem with our professional development and our college level teacher preparation. It's not the teachers who dropped the ball. It's the system that dropped the ball in educating those teachers. I think teachers have got to understand what expertise is. They really have to become disciplinary experts in something so that they understand what that is. And then it's like, then you would start to read real science or read real mathematicians. 

Louise Music  

Except that everything is changing so quickly, all the time. It's about disciplinary knowledge, but also connecting to experts. This is where the internet can be so important as a resource for young people to be researchers.  And children, themselves, are resources for knowledge. I think that as we worry about children's learning loss from COVID, we are missing out on mining children's experience to find out what they have experienced through living through a global pandemic.  From children at the ages of four and five and six, there is so much important knowledge for all of us. I don't think we can be surprised that people are using scripted curriculum, because I experience it as I volunteer in a second grade classroom here in Oakland, California. I'm shocked by it. But I am also impressed by the dedication, the stability, the love, and the well meaningness that this teacher brings to their students. I think it's about finding better ways to use the internet, I think it's about open education resources. And it's about teachers learning from each other and opening up their classrooms, and also learning from the students.

Climate Change Trauma 

Cally Flox 

How many researchers in education have shown that the more relevant something is, the better the students learn it, and what's more relevant than the world around you? And certainly, we're missing an educational opportunity when we stick to scripted curriculum that doesn't allow us to follow the news and track what's happening and relevant in the world and in fact, protecting our homes and families? We also must acknowledge the impacts of trauma on learning.  There is an important trauma sensitive schools movement, and their conferences are growing every year because teachers need some place to turn to support the shared traumas that everyone is enduring. 

One of the things we know is that anything learned with stress is recalled with that same stress, because of the way the neural pathways are laid down, and the emotions you attach to information as it's formed. Those same neural pathways are activated when you access that information. We all shared COVID, and we all learned stressful things. People talk about learning loss, but we fail to learn what children experienced during the pandemic shut down while their families endured stress, trying to make ends meet and maintain their jobs.  There are many things that happened and ways that people responded, including racial reckonings and extreme climate events.  I really wonder what would happen if we interviewed people ten years from now about how all of this has impacted them. Today’s students might be performing well on tests, but can they describe what happened to them in the world as they were growing up?

Lois Hetland   

I think it must have to do with fear when people don't want to face climate change, and describe it as just another day at school, or it's not in my science curriculum. 

Heather Francis   

Fear or desensitization. My friend in Florida said that overtime extreme weather becomes an everyday thing. It's every year, and people become desensitized to it. She likened it to an abusive relationship.  It just is what it is.  I think that goes to one of the climate myths that the climate has always been changing. True enough but the rate of change is unlike anything in the past. 

Cally Flox   

How will the children tell the stories of these hurricanes, and make meaning of them for the future, if we don't let them talk about these hurricanes while they're experiencing them?

• Do Scientists Agree on Climate Change? Yes - The Vast Majority 97%
• Childhood Trauma Due to Climate Change
• With A Changing Climate, Students are Facing a Mental Health Crisis
• Eco- Anxiety is Harming Young People’s Mental Health - But it Doesn’t Have To

• CHLLpodcast.com
• CHLL on Instagram
• CHLL on Facebook

Subscribe on apple, spotify, pandora, amazon, google