A ‘wicked problem’: rethinking history education in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

In seeking to attune history education to a relational, ecological, and ethical future orientation, we turned to scholarship in other fields that teach similar or proximate outcomes: Indigenous studies, environmental history, and climate change education. We suggest that the challenge in history is not just teaching about climate variation over time and its consequences, but also recognizing that the Anthropocene is a multidimensional phenomenon requiring adaptation in ways of being and understanding ourselves. We draw on the literature in each of the above-mentioned fields to leverage theory, content, and pedagogical cues to begin envisioning how history teachers and learners can seek meaning, when the terms within which we have made meaning in the past may slip away. In this article, we offer a prospective agenda for provoking history education to make significant change, particularly in Canada where we are situated. Our suggestions for history teaching and learning practice may be deployed in many different contexts to help educators confront the climate crisis. As historians and educators, we must provide these opportunities to learn about the past because as Davis and Todd state, ‘the story we tell ourselves about environmental crises, the story of humanity’s place on the earth and its presence within geological time determines how we understand how we got here, where we might like to be headed, and what we need to do’.

KEYWORDS:

• History education
• Anthropocene
• climate change education
• Indigenous education
• environmental history
• environmental education

Introduction

Most scientists acknowledge that we are living in the Anthropocene, when humans are the dominant influence on the Earth (Lewis and Maslin 2015). Science projects a future in which higher mean temperatures, drought, sea-level rise, multi-year sea ice melt, decreased biodiversity, extinctions, and ocean acidification are associated with a greater than 1.5-degree change in climate (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2018), and the consequences of these changes can be witnessed today. Whether or not humans adapt our capitalist consumption, food production, and polluting behaviours, these consequences will catch up with us, and greater disparity in social and economic conditions will follow (Islam and Winkel 2017). Considering the massive changes that human societies must undertake to mitigate and respond to climate change, we all need to reconsider how we spend our time and energy in our personal and professional lives. We (the authors) are early-career scholars who work in educational history, history education at grade school and post-secondary levels, and teacher education. We are highly concerned about environmental issues and as emerging scholars we have the opportunity to shape our careers accordingly; to find a path that does not exclude our climate anxiety from our everyday teaching and research activities. Through this provocation, we invite other history scholars and teachers to consider: Is history education still relevant in the Anthropocene? Is it well justified by our global needs? When so many aspects of our way of life need to change to ensure a future in which we can still flourish, why should we spend time thinking about the past?

Within a community of history teachers, it may be easy to argue that as much as history education is supposed to be about the past, it is oriented towards the present. History teachers at all levels of education are guided by a variety of purposes, such as cultural inheritance, critical and disciplinary thinking, identity formation and personal development, or activism and social change. Each of these purposes is imbued with notions of memory, citizenship, and other values relevant to preparing young people for the present and future. And yet, this orientation does not offer much comfort. It may not always be explicit (den Heyer 2017), but a prevailing assumption in history education in Canada is that the future is a place and time to which we should look forward, as it will improve upon the past. We are coming to acknowledge, perhaps too slowly, that this is not an adequate or responsible frame to pass on to the next generation.

We hear very little dialogue amongst our history teaching colleagues about whether changing environmental conditions are informing a new approach to history education (an exception is van Kessel 2020). Not dissuaded, our research informing this manuscript began with the premise that there must be something significant history education can contribute to the ‘wicked problem’ (Scranton 2015) of climate crisis. We wonder if other historians and history educators share these questions as they renew their approach to teaching in the precarious times of the Anthropocene: How can stories from the past help students think about change and become more resilient in the face of it? What approaches to learning will best serve students in finding meaningful connections between the past, present, and future while responding to the threats of climate change? What responsibilities do history teachers have for nurturing empathy and modelling ethical relations in a rapidly changing – and likely stratified – world?

In seeking to attune history education to a relational, ecological, and ethical future orientation we turned to scholarship in other fields that teach similar outcomes: Indigenous studies, environmental history, and climate change education. We suggest that the challenge in history is not just teaching about climate variation over time and its consequences, but recognizing that the Anthropocene is a multidimensional phenomenon requiring adaptation in ways of being and understanding ourselves. In what follows, we introduce theoretical touchstones that are particularly salient to reforming history education in the interest of responsiveness to the Anthropocene. We applied titles to these touchstones, having drawn inspiration from the title of Lear’s book Radical Hope (Lear 2006), as follows: radical truth, radical hope, radical imagining, and radical teaching. We draw on literature in each of the above-mentioned fields to leverage theory, content, and pedagogical cues to begin envisioning how history teachers and learners can seek meaning, when the terms within which we have made meaning in the past may slip away. Lastly, we offer suggestions for history teaching and learning practice, which may be deployed in many different historical contexts to help educators confront the climate crisis. This article attempts to cover a lot of ground in outlining the context of history education in Canada, summarizing potential theoretical contributions from several other fields in a prospective agenda for history education reform, and making suggestions to inform teaching. As a result, we recognize that some readers will find one or more of these pursuits unsatisfying in their depth. Nevertheless, we position this article as an invitation to extend and grow the scholarly conversation, and given the recent International Panel on Climate Change report, we view it as urgent to do so amongst, and between, educational theorists and practitioners.

Canadian History Teachers Paying Attention to the Anthropocene?

We suspect that inspired, connected, and concerned teachers have taken their students outside to learn history, brought land and water into their history classrooms, or featured issues of ecology, climate, and more-than-human beings in powerful ways and over many years. We understand the more-than-human as comprising all life beyond the human species, including beings that tend not to be attributed sentience (e.g. rocks), and understand our relationships with those beings as necessary in order to be human (Abram 1997/2017; Derby 2015). The question of normative commitments to environmental topics or learning outcomes relevant to large-scale change within history education is difficult to pin down, given Canada’s diffuse educational policy and practice context (e.g., we have no national curriculum). At the time of our review of the literature, with the exception of van Kessel (2020), who writes about the utility of terror management theory in preparing teachers for the uncomfortable work of discussing mortality associated with climate crisis, there are few research projects or resources on teaching about or in response to climate change in Canadian history classrooms.

While the history of environmental education is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth noting that since the Rio Summit in 1992 education for sustainable development was advanced as an international goal for mitigation and adaptation to environmental change. In other words, education has long been seen as part of the solution for environmental challenges, including climate change. That this learning must be informed by, and occur within, disciplines other than the most obvious physical or environmental sciences was a point made by early advocates (Sitarz 1993). However, concerns have been raised about simply inserting environmental issues into other subject areas without sufficient support and resources. For example, in the Ontario context where we work, Tan and Pendretti state: ‘educators may feel that environmental education may not be wholly compatible with certain subjects (e.g. history and English)’ (2010 76).

Significant potential lies with history education in Canada, especially as recent reforms emphasize second-order historical thinking learning outcomes intended to align with methods core to the discipline of history (Clark 2011; Seixas 2017). This framework is potentially as relevant to preparing youth for understanding environmental complexities in the past, as for any other complexities more common to the history classroom (e.g. competing political ideologies). Seixas and Morton’s guide to teaching historical thinking, The Big Six Historical Thinking Concepts, suggests as one of its guideposts in making ethical decisions, ‘Our understanding of history can help us make informed judgments about contemporary issues, but only when we recognize the limitations of any direct “lessons” from the past’ (2013,13). Interpreting the past in this way demonstrates the integration of citizenship skills with disciplinary pursuits at the heart of the historical thinking project.

More robust efforts to assess and improve history education across Canada using evidence-based research are currently underway, for example through a seven-year project (2019–2026) entitled Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future (Peck et al. 2020). In addition to evaluating and enhancing historical thinking and citizenship education outcomes, this project promises a focus on ‘trans-systemic knowledge systems’ (see Battise and Henderson 2009). These are efforts to teach in ways that account for Indigenous knowledges and set them on equal footing with the Eurocentric knowledges that traditionally dominated history classes, despite the noted challenges in doing so to date (Cutrara 2018; Gibson and Case 2019; Marker 2011, 97–112; McGregor 2017; Miles 2018; Taylor 2018). This is only more relevant as disproportionate impacts of climate change on Indigenous communities infringe on Indigenous rights (Watt-Cloutier 2015). These reforms may support ‘unlearning colonialism’ or colonial logics, and recentring local ways of knowing, being, and doing derived from Indigenous knowledges and relations within their ecosystems (Donald 2019). However, we note that there is no mention of environmental catastrophe in this reform-oriented project.

Beyond the top-down calls from non-governmental organizations, educational authorities, or subject experts, perhaps history teachers are compelled to respond to bottom-up demands – the views of their students. Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for climate) has come into common parlance, following the efforts of Swedish student, Greta Thunberg. Her message is simple: if those in power are unwilling to make the changes scientists recommend to mitigate climate change, attending school to prepare for the future is not worthwhile (Alter, Haynes and Worland 2019). Beyond the massive demonstrations in solidarity with Thunberg during the Fall of 2019, we have not seen a pattern of sustained youth walk-outs from schools and universities in Canada. Nevertheless, teachers can use this movement as another opportunity to mobilize and show young people that formal education, and history classes more specifically, are far from irrelevant. They can make classrooms places where students feel their problems are being considered, their emotions, concerns, and hopes are being heard, and their needs in making sense of their place in time (in relation to both the past and future) is of highest priority.

Finally, we are reminded of the challenging process of becoming a history teacher, let alone one who takes on the complex work of discussing sometimes politically charged topics such as climate change and environmental racism. As stated by Sears (2014), the community of practice surrounding history teaching is responsible for helping new teachers move from ‘the periphery to the core’ of a discipline that they may, or may not, have much practice with themselves (11). Likewise, the reform of history education towards an emphasis on learning outcomes relevant in the precarious times of the Anthropocene demands a response within professional learning communities. We need a framework of goals, concrete examples of activities facilitating those goals, resource development, training, mentorship, and professional exchange. Here we begin seeking directions from other fields in order to construct vital questions for history educators.

Radical theoretical touchstones

Our thinking is guided by four interdisciplinary scholars who evoke some of the complex influences we hope will inform history educators in the Anthropocene. While they work in different fields and for different audiences, we find their messages complementary. These scholars seek knowledges and actions that honour the diverse forms of human and more-than-human life on the planet, sustain ethical relations between those forms of life, and draw attention to the ability of life to demonstrate flexibility in changing conditions. Below we use the word radical to refer to their contributions, and by that we mean complete or extreme in the sense of causing fundamental shifts away from the status quo. Within our context, the status quo is constituted by dominant Euro-Western humanist-capitalist-colonialist structures and ‘mythologies’ (Donald 2019) which inscribe culture/nature dualism.

The first scholar is Roy Scranton (2015), who offers us the radical truth of climate crisis as guaranteeing the end of our global capitalist civilization. Instead of denying this societal death, just as humans constantly deny our own individual mortality, he says we should let go of our ideas of self, future, certainty, permanence, and stability. Instead of an obsession with technological fixes or economic sutures that betray our fear and reactivity, we should focus on preserving ‘rich stocks of human cultural technology’ (26) – our wisdom. Hence, he designates a crucial role for the humanities, stating:

The library of human cultural technologies that is our archive, the concrete record of human thought in all languages that comprises the entirety of our existence as historical beings, is not only the seed stock of our future intellectual growth, but its soil, its sources, its womb. The fate of the humanities, as we confront the end of modern civilization, is the fate of humanity itself. (109)

In ‘learning to die’, Scranton asks us not to abandon the many ways we have been human (and other-than-human), just because the limits of this fossil-fuel expression of humanity have been exceeded. In this effort, we need to rework the meaning of history and memory (99).

The second scholar we turn to is Jonathan Lear, who provides an example of a file in Scranton’s metaphorical archive. His philosophical anthropology, entitled Radical Hope (Lear 2006), reminds us that human societies in the past have faced and traversed devastation. In brief, Lear examines the story of Chief Plenty Coups and his leadership of the Crow Nation through colonization and dispossession by the American state. Plenty Coups witnessed the loss of the buffalo and wild horses, and with it the way of life that provided the terms within which happiness, courage, and hope could be understood and expressed by his people; ‘disrupting one’s basic sense of being’ (Lear 2006, 68). In a dream, he saw the chickadee bird as representing the way forward because, ‘He is least in strength but strongest of mind among his kind. He is willing to work for wisdom. The chickadee-person is a good listener’ (80). Plenty Coups is guided by this chickadee figure to seek alternative solutions for his culture. His act of radical hope ensures that the Crow would be represented in government and hold onto more land than other Indigenous peoples. Further to the description of the chickadee, Lear (2006) states:

The only substantive commitment embodied in the chickadee virtue is that if one listens and learns from others in the right way—even in radically different circumstances, even with the collapse of one’s world—something good will come of it. (82)

Lear concludes that by following this model in a period of cultural destruction, humans can find ways to overcome difficulties even if those difficulties will destroy their present cultures. Lear’s contribution to our understanding of what it means to learn in the Anthropocene is the way of the chickadee: listening and learning to be flexible – and practice radical hope.

The third scholar is Dwayne Donald (2009, 2019), who helps us take these ideas into the realm of education more specifically. His scholarship highlights the core problem with the current curriculum, and the public education system more broadly, which is found in their underlying mythologies, or ‘the embracing of a dream predicated on unfettered economic growth and material prosperity’ (Donald 2019, 104). He goes on to say, ‘This dream-way manifests itself as a naturalized, universalized, and common-sense logic that has come to have tremendous influence over public education curriculum initiatives in mostly subtle way’ (105). He demonstrates how individualism, progress, and anthropocentrism (that human beings are the most important life form) are foundational to our worldview, and thus what we teach youth in schools. Participation in market capitalism, then, provides the answer to the ontological question of what it means to be a human being. By extension, successful participation in the economy provides the answer to the philosophical question of the purpose of schooling in our society.

Donald (2019) draws from Daniel Quinn’s book The Story of B to introduce ‘The Great Forgetting’, which is the idea that we have been taught to ‘forget’ that people live(d) well in other ways. Donald turns to Blackfoot story and Cree knowledge as a tonic to this problem, and guidance on other ways to live a good life. He teaches:

Stories that give life emerge from people sitting together in the spirit of good relations and thinking carefully on their shared future as human beings. For me, such work is guided by the Cree concept of wahkohtowin (LaBoucane-Benson et al. 2012), which teaches that, as human beings, we are enmeshed in a series of relationships (human and more-than-human) that give us life. The model of a real human being that wahkohtowin provides is one who acknowledges those relationships daily and strives to live in ways that sustains them. (121)

Therefore, Donald helps us undertake radical imagining – that schools could be shaken free of totalizing mythologies predicated on market logics, and become places where people sit together to ponder our place in a web of sustaining relations.

The fourth scholar, Michael Derby (2015), reinforces and extends the intellectual pursuits outlined above. We see his contribution as theoretically consistent with the influences of Scranton, Lear, and Donald, as we move toward conceptualizing ways of radical teaching in the Anthropocene. His inquiry in Place Being Resonance has little to do with teaching history explicitly, it is about education in relation to the natural world. He asks readers to recognize ‘that there is a kind of wisdom, or, at least, a clearing for wisdom to germinate in the act of fixing our attention on something real; or put in slightly different terms, on something relational, something ecological’ (8, italics in the original). An example of what Derby means by this ‘something real’ is, literally, a red maple leaf that falls near a path by which we walk through the forest. That is, he writes about nurturing a disposition that is not only open to, but actively seeking, resonance through relations with ecology including plants and other species. As Donald (2019) refers to the problematic ‘mythologies’ that guide our common sense, Derby (2015) calls them ‘root metaphors’. The ‘ecohermeneutic’ task, as he calls it, is a tonic against these metaphors, which privilege ‘individualism, progress, and anthropocentrism’ (115). Derby goes on to offer pedagogical suggestions that are deeply informed by Indigenous scholarship, and not inconsistent with history and memory work: ‘cultivating awareness of place, history and culture through storytelling; acknowledging the value of oral traditions and intergenerational knowledges; utilizing interpretive and experiential learning in the process of inquiry’ (112). History class should be a place where we can also see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and be with the more-than-human.

From these scholars, we understand that the threats to our current form of global society, and to our future, in the way we have imagined them, are great. Nevertheless, we could imagine differently. There are other ways of being human and nurturing life that we can learn; we are not locked in. Studying the past in this context is not a futile project or waste of time, but rather a strategy for this imagining, for identifying what has been possible and what could be possible (den Heyer 2017). It is a way of getting outside the terms of reference we are so familiar with, what has come to be common sense in the now. It implies leveraging what we already do in history class differently, and also expanding what we do in history class. There are ways of sowing relations among beings that constitute planetary life. We need to focus, and practice. This radical vision, however, may leave teachers hungry for practical advice and concrete suggestions, and seeking those specifics is part of the purpose of this article.

How can we learn with Indigenous knowledges?

Indigenous Elders have, for generations, generously offered their knowledge and experience about ways to hear what the land needs, to sense what it has to teach us, and to relate with respect to other beings with whom we share the planet. The extent to which those who teach, those who make decisions or hold power, those who shape and influence our ‘mythologies’ and ‘root metaphors’ have heard this wisdom – or taken it seriously – does not match this generosity. Indeed, Indigenous communities have instead been subject to land dispossession, colonial oppression, genocide, linguicide, cultural assimilation, and now disproportionate effects of climate change (Truth and Reconciliation Canada 2015).

The academic and education communities, and the public broadly speaking, should not require university-qualified thought-leaders to validate the importance of Indigenous perspectives. And we must remember the history of significant harm resulting from researchers appropriating, misinterpreting, and benefitting from Indigenous knowledges (Smith 2012). We (the authors) are committed to alignment with scholars who have tried to mobilize knowledges that provide a tonic to our embrace of Eurocentrism. We try to learn from those who suggest remembering and reimagining ways of being human that have been marginalized through the process of colonization, industrialization, and fossil-fuel economy dominance. It is not only because these worldviews have been marginalized that we suggest centring them, it is also because they have maintained sustainable ways of knowing, being, and doing within their ecosystems. Lear, Donald, and Derby, discussed above, are helpful in this effort as are Cruikshank (2007), Basso (1996), and Marker (2006).

Given the situatedness of Indigenous experience with place and particular conditions, it is difficult, and sometimes inappropriate, to draw generalizations from this literature that can apply to history educators across the board. Authors, philosophers, and academics such as those named above have demonstrated the ways in which epistemologies, ontologies, and outcomes significantly differ in Indigenous knowledge systems, from Western understandings. They have repeatedly called for an increase in authentic, interdisciplinary, and land-based approaches to education that privilege experiential knowledge of local places in order to seek solutions to the impacts of colonialism (See Chambers 2006; McCoy, Tuck, and McKenzie 2017; Smith, Tuck, and Yang 2018). This type of education is inherently challenging as it must consider ‘difficult knowledge’ (Britzman 1998; Farley 2009, 539); about the past while prioritizing local Indigenous contexts. Furthermore, it requires time and relationships with communities willing to help support this learning. Educators are called upon to actively seek opportunities to engage in conversations about educational approaches that respond to the needs of their own context, including those that centre decolonizing theory and ethical relations (Donald 2009). This means, for example, building relationships across difference, spending time outside, seeking ways of becoming an ally to Indigenous communities, and pursuing reciprocity.

Learning from the field of Indigenous studies should not be limited to what is written in academic publications. Educators may be inspired to listen to and learn from Indigenous youth in Canada who are on the front lines of climate crisis activism. Autumn Peltier, a teenager from Wiikwemkoong First Nation on Manitoulin Island in Ontario, presented at the United Nations about the importance of clean water. She shared her own personal experience with not having access to clean drinking water growing up in Canada: ‘I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again, we can’t eat money, or drink oil.’ (The Canadian Press 2019).

Furthermore, learning with Indigenous knowledges must be accompanied by tracing the development of our ostensibly culturally neutral institutions (such as schools and universities), and disciplines (including history) as rooted in racisms and exclusions (Stanley 2000). Indeed, with respect to the notion of the Anthropocene itself, Davis and Todd (2017) argue it is ‘the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, that have been at work for the last five hundred years’ (761). Colonialism is the essential process upon which this epoch is predicated. Davis and Todd point to 1610 as the ‘golden spike’ of the Anthropocene for two reasons (see also Lewis and Maslin 2015). The first justification is that by 1610 the exchange of plants and animals between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ worlds had drastically changed environments according to the archeological record. The second reason derives from evidence of the genocide of Indigenous peoples in North America between 1492 and 1650. Approximately 50 million people died, producing a visible drop in carbon emissions in ice core samples from that period (766). As Davis and Todd point out, these logics are not universal, as the term ‘anthropos’ might imply; neither are they inevitable or simply ‘human nature’. Therefore, despite some grievances, Davis and Todd agree that the term Anthropocene is constructive in defining our time because it groups together ‘the horrors of environmental crisis and in re-animating our relations with the world in a manner that draws, but is also differentiated from, the environmental movements of the past’ (776). It is crucial that we invite history students to examine the ongoing situated legacies of colonization, and particularly settler colonialism in the North American context.

Such debates about the term Anthropocene (Mahli 2017), only briefly highlighted above, leave it ripe for authentic teaching, critical or historical thinking, and student engagement at multiple levels of education. Rather than uncritically accepting the arrival of the Anthropocene, we encourage learners to use the concept as a theoretical tool to analyze change over time, cause and consequence, and the ethical implications of human-environment relationships. We are inspired by Davis and Todd’s imperative: ‘The story we tell ourselves about environmental crises, the story of humanity’s place on the earth and its presence within geological time determines how we understand how we got here, where we might like to be headed, and what we need to do’ (2017, 764).

What can we learn from past environments and societies?

The field of environmental history emerged alongside the growth of environmental activism in the 1960s (Carson 1962). As historians began to ask new questions about the past and incorporate environmental perspectives that differed from natural history, the field of environmental history emerged to understand the changing relationships between human societies and natural environments over time. Central to environmental history is the idea that non-human beings, such as plants and animals, possess agency and, therefore, shaped the past (Hughes 2006). By shifting the focus away from an anthropocentric account of the past, environmental history offers new explanatory paradigms (see Crosby 1986).

Most relevant to our inquiry, environmental history offers insight into how past societies were impacted by changes in climate, from agricultural hardship and resource scarcity to dramatic weather patterns and natural disasters (Fagan 2004; Flannery 2005). For example, Diamond (2004) considers the major causes, including environmental causes, of societal devastation over centuries and evaluates the responses different societies had to the challenges they faced. DeGroot (2019) explores how people in past societies demonstrated resilience by surviving through climate changes. In the case of the Norse, historians have long believed that their settlements disappeared during the Little Ice Age due to their sedentary agricultural practices and inability to adapt. However, new research shows that the Norse were not just ‘hapless victims’ of a changing climate, but they developed irrigation systems and hunted more walrus for food (DeGroot 2019). Such examples of innovation and resilience not only inform how we understand the past, but also provide relevant insights as we respond to the current climate crisis.

There is an activist subtext to much environmental history as its proponents believe it has a role to play in (re)shaping human relationships with the natural world. As Cronon (1993) has explained, environmental knowledge is culturally constructed and historically contingent, meaning that past conceptions of and interactions with nature are not static but forever changing. All history has a natural context so, as Hughes (2006) pointed out, ‘environmental history can be a corrective to the prevalent tendency of humans to see themselves as separate from nature, above nature, and in charge of nature’ (4). In a reflective piece about teaching an environmental history course to high school students, Schwartz (2011) found that students began to re-evaluate their assumptions about the centrality of humans in history and made meaningful connections to the present. She explains, ‘I find that in environmental history in particular, students discover an intensely relevant story. They see themselves in the past, even the remote past, and wonder about their place in the bigger scheme of things’ (Schwartz 2011, 40). Clearly the potential for environmental history with students is abundant.

Despite what seems to be an obvious and relatively commensurable fit between environmental history research and history education in schools, our review of the literature on teaching environmental history at any level suggests current resources are few (Evenden and MacEachern 2007; MacEachern and Turkel October 2009; Oosthoek 2011; Schwartz 2006; Macfarlane 2021). However, Wakild and Berry (2018) provide a series of design principles for instruction at the university level and argue that educators have a moral obligation to teach about the environment: ‘Neglecting environmental topics is no longer ethically reasonable. To leave the environment out of history is to imagine that humans live in a world different from this one’ (2). To fulfill this responsibility, educators can adopt their approach to environmental history, which emphasizes change and adaptation narratives, exposes power imbalances, rejects learning that adheres to national boundaries, and is cognizant of the false dichotomy that often sets humans against nature (5–7). Wakild and Berry also promote learning outside of the classroom to connect with the history of local environments. It is here that we find an overlap between teaching practices in environmental history and climate change education, as learning about the environment requires interdisciplinary approaches that bridge history, science, geography, and ecology.

How can we learn to respond to climate change?

Climate change education offers teachers and students a way forward in the precarious times of the Anthropocene, albeit generally without reference to anything of value that can be learned from studying the past. Instead, the scholarship on climate change education primarily focuses on contributions from the sciences, geography, economics, and outdoor education in developing a greater awareness of natural and human systems and an appreciation for the environment among students (Kagawa and Selby 2010; Finley 2014; Assadourian and Mastny 2017; Jickling et al. 2018). For example, one article outlines how constructivist-based experiential learning in a high school biology class reduced student misconceptions about climate change as they engaged in onsite observations of endangered ecosystems (Karpudewan and Ali Khan 2017). Through this experiential approach students were more motivated to think critically about climate change and were able to apply their learning to brainstorm solutions that could potentially resolve the issues they witnessed.

Other scholars have also highlighted student-centered learning in climate change education, in an attempt to make learning more meaningful since ‘climate change challenges traditional learning methods and ideas about learning’ (Lehtonen, Salonen, and Cantell 2019, 360). In a 2019 review of the past two decades of scholarship on climate change education, Martha Monroe et al. (2019) found that the most common active learning strategies included classroom discussions and debates, role plays and simulations, lab experiments, and implementing new projects. Many of these lessons were focused on fostering resilience and creating change at the community level, such as developing climate risk management strategies, gathering evidence of local climate change, using carbon calculators, and outlining steps for energy conservation.

When it comes to climate change education, scholars have identified other areas of inquiry beyond pedagogical approaches and the specific (and often scientific) knowledge students should possess about the environment. According to experts, climate change education has the potential to disrupt the human-centred mindset that has resulted in problems like overconsumption, widespread pollution, and habitat destruction, and can contribute to a transformation in thinking and learning that is needed in the Anthropocene (Golin and Campbell 2017; Lehtonen, Salonen, and Cantell 2019). In particular, empathetic understanding and ethical thinking are key to realizing how our actions have global consequences for both humans and nonhumans (Barker and Franklin 2017). Promoting a greater sense of connectivity, immersing students in nature, and encouraging them to rethink their relationships with the environment develops eco-socially educated individuals and fosters nature connectedness (Braun, Cottrell, and Dierkes 2017; Sobel 2017; Lehtonen, Salonen, and Cantell 2019). These are all important qualities for students to develop during their education, in order to possess the ecological awareness and resources they require to meet the future challenges of the Anthropocene. Although it is not often mentioned, we see the history classroom as an important site for supporting and extending the learning outcomes valued by climate change educators.

From theory to practice

We have endeavoured to identify ideas, questions, and resources that history educators can use in adapting our teaching to the needs and priorities of learners who are situating themselves in the Anthropocene. As this appears to be a new path for history education, we hope the following framework of preliminary goals can become the start of a conversation among an interdisciplinary and diverse teaching and learning community (Table 1). This section of the article relies on our experience as historians and history teachers in grade school and post-secondary education contexts in Canada, and our learning thus far from scholars in different fields who are speaking about the ways the past can inform the ongoing Anthropocene.

Table 1. Ideas for teaching history in the Anthropocene

Theoretical Touchstones	Broad Goals for History Education in the Anthropocene	Specific Suggestions
Radical Truth	1. Describe and contextualize significant present environmental conditions, challenges, and threats to life on a local, regional, and global scale, including the causes and consequences for impacted humans and more-than-humans.	Compare arguments for different dates and characteristics used to define the geological epoch of the ‘Anthropocene’, and recommend a rationale for periodization.
	2. Apply the historical inquiry process and ecological literacy to better understand the interactions of different groups of humans and other species in a specific instance of environmental-social conflict or inequity.	Research the history of a natural resource management controversy and resulting policy/plan, including who has been involved in it, and what impacts it has had for humans and other species.
Radical Imagining	3. Adopting the perspective of a species or more-than-human actor, analyze the relative influence of European worldviews in comparison to Indigenous worldviews over time, and identify how such worldviews have directly shaped relations with that species, indirectly impacted them (e.g. via economic or educational structures), and defined available options, including consequences experienced now or anticipated in the future.	Examine the role or importance of trees (or a river) from Euro-Canadian perspectives in comparison to Indigenous perspectives, and what outcomes these relationships have had for ‘Canadian’ species, their ecosystems, and the humans that depend on them.
	4. Apply the historical inquiry process and respectful approaches to learning with Indigenous knowledge in a case study of a specific relationship between an Indigenous community and their territories, or species within their territories, over time and up to the present.	Seek learning opportunities from local Indigenous knowledge keepers to understand the direct impacts of climate change on their lifeways.
Radical Teaching	5. Participate in a variety of experiences, learning opportunities, or pedagogies that build ethical relationships with the environment and its more-than-human constituents (e.g. demonstrate respectful curiosity and observation; facilitate listening, sensing, and care; consider the perspectives of other species).	Conduct an oral history interview with a local Elder or grandparent about observations they have made about changes to local plant and animal species or environments, and then spend time outdoors observing the focus of your discussion.
	6. Apply inquiry, communication, and knowledge mobilization skills to understanding or supporting an environmental issue that has been/is being addressed through activism, policy, legislation, community consultation, and citizen engagement.	Study the establishment and advocacy efforts over time of a local environmental organization (e.g. water-quality advocacy group) or individual activist.
Radical Hope	7. Identify triggers for and symptoms of eco-anxiety, including affective responses to worldview threat that may support or constrain tolerance, and explain personal/interpersonal strategies to mitigate eco-anxiety.	Share stories about youth in other times and places who have faced significant challenges as a result of climate change and discuss how they remained hopeful in the face of uncertainty and demonstrated resilience.
	8. Construct a personal narrative (or philosophy) that identifies the conditions for a meaningful human and more-than-human life in the context of unprecedented environmental change, and identify potential actions that align with, or serve, that narrative.	Create a digital story that invites viewers to reframe human values to consider more-than-human rights and agency.

As we live and research on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee, we are cognizant of their histories of the places we occupy. The Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region have been predicting our current geological epoch since time immemorial. According to the Seventh Fires Prophecy of Anishnaabe oral traditions, ‘each fire represents a period of time marked by the occurrence of significant events, celestial happenings and prophesied experiences’ (Fontaine 2020, 8). During each of the different fires or epochs, Anishinaabe history is retold from the early origins until today, where we have arrived in the Seventh Fire. In this final period, the Anishinaabe predicted that the land, air, and water would be damaged, and it would be up to the Seventh Fire people to restore balance to the earth. As Indigenous author, Robin Kimmerer (2013), explained:

The Seventh Fire prophecy presents a second vision for time that is upon us. It tells that all the people of the earth will see that the path is divided. They must make a choice in their path to the future. One of the roads is soft and green with new grass. You could walk barefoot there. The other path is scorched black, hard; the cinders would cut your feet. If the people choose the grassy path, then life will be sustained. But if they choose the cinder path, the damage they have wrought upon the earth will turn against them and bring suffering and death to earth’s people. (368)

If the education system is going to respond to these threats to human and more-than-human livelihoods, and inspire the people to act now, we have no time to lose in advancing practical solutions from our theoretical touchstones to inspire change. We hope these suggestions will invite educators to guide their students towards the grassy path.

Some anticipated challenges

We hope history educators find these theoretical touchstones, broad goals, and specific suggestions useful in guiding their thinking as they develop learning opportunities that highlight history’s potential in responding to an uncertain future. Some of the topics (e.g. consequences of natural disasters) and pedagogies (e.g. inquiry-based learning) are familiar and remain core to the learning processes we are proposing. On the other hand, we are advocating for a significant departure from present practice.

As the broad goals in Table 1 demonstrate, we suggest that teachers re-evaluate the topics that are important in history classrooms under these circumstances and centre radical truth, by inquiring into local and global environmental histories, and histories of human flexibility and resilience. This serves to model the skills necessary to contextualize complex environmental conflicts that will increasingly demand public attention. We advocate for radical imagining, which asks learners to identify, examine, and critique the assumptions (or mythologies/root metaphors) that underpin society’s current values, and then envision ways of living differently. This can partly be achieved and strengthened by studying those in the past who lived differently in relation to the environment, and continuing to advocate for different relations with the more-than-human today. In the context of a settler-colonial state, the alignment of these goals with Indigenous self-determination efforts is not coincidental; for us, it is a crucial role of history education. We suggested a move towards radical teaching, which makes space in the history classroom for evidence, agency, perspectives, and ethical questions that derive from more-than-human beings, and may result in increased connectedness with those beings. It likewise aims to channel learning into action, which is consistent with citizenship expectations of history education in Canadian schools but also desirable at the post-secondary level. To make history classrooms a place of radical hope, we have suggested a two-pronged approach: (1) attending to eco-anxiety and the range of other emotional responses and complex aspects of climate change education (van Kessel 2020) and (2) encouraging youth to write their own stories about the meaning of life as life changes. We anticipate confrontations with change will demand moving away from narratives that set benchmarks for success derived from consumer-capitalist-extractivist ways of living witnessed in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, and defining human wellness and survivance in new, relational, systems-oriented, sustainable terms. Furthermore, perhaps the process of writing these stories will draw student attention to the fundamental condition of historicity: that humans are defined by the time and conditions in which they find themselves (conditions that were left to us by those who came before). And yet, further change is always on the horizon.

This is not a call to turn everyone into an environmental activist, but to give students the opportunity to situate themselves in a meaningful story of change. We need to find a balance between learning about the past, contextualizing the distinct conditions of the present, and thinking about contemporary actions that may shape the future. In making such a transition, we acknowledge that history educators will be faced with new challenges, several of which we outline below.

The uncertainty and unpredictability surrounding our future in the Anthropocene can lead to feelings of despair. It is likely that some students may express emotional responses during discussions of species and habitat loss, natural disasters, economic volatility, social inequity, and other aspects of climate crisis. In fact, the difficulties of coping with climate change and imagining the future have become so widespread that a new term has been created to describe this phenomenon: ‘eco-anxiety’ (Lehtonen, Salonen, and Cantell 2019, 351). Teachers should be prepared to provide students with support while fostering resilience and building their capacity to encounter difficult knowledge. Echoing Lear’s description of radical hope, perhaps teachers will play a role in promoting what climate change educators are calling constructive hope: ‘the ability to see something meaningful and promising after encountering a challenging situation’ (352).

Another significant challenge to teaching about climate crisis is climate denial. History educators may face questions from parents and other stakeholders as they begin incorporating climate issues into their history classrooms. Teachers of other subjects that already cover climate change as part of their curriculum, like the sciences and outdoor education, have encountered pushback in some cases. The situation is often exacerbated when this teaching occurs in regions where discussions of natural resource extraction, habitat destruction, or factory farming are controversial or taboo subjects due to the influence of local industries. Unfortunately, this reality has made some teachers reluctant to teach about climate change (Wise 2010). We know, however, that history teachers are not new to controversy. In the face of climate denial, we encourage history teachers not to shy away from such important subjects, but to find creative ways to present materials that teach students how to think rather than what to think.

As we conclude, we acknowledge that there may be further challenges and questions history educators encounter as they respond to the precarity of the Anthropocene. History teachers should not take this on alone. Fostering interdisciplinary learning and collaboration with diverse knowledge holders will extend the potential of any one teacher tackling these topics. Finding colleagues and collaborators who are open-minded, flexible, passionate, and supportive will make the work easier and more rewarding. Drawing insights from Indigenous studies, environmental history, and climate change education, we suggested some new and even radical directions we might look as a community of history educators. In doing so, we hope to have proposed a path in navigating uncertainty together. With a set of common questions, assumptions, and goals to guide us, we may find ways of teaching and learning that respond more meaningfully to the precarity of our times.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heather E. McGregor

Heather E. McGregor is an Assistant Professor of Curriculum Theory in the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. Her research and publications can be found in the fields of Arctic and Indigenous education, historical thinking and historical consciousness in history education, and most recently, environmental and climate change education. Whatever her focus, Dr. McGregor maintains a commitment to, and curiosity about, decolonizing approaches to teaching, learning and research. (Primary author contact: [email protected])

Jackson Pind

Jackson Pind is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. His doctoral research focuses on the history of Indian Day Schools in Ontario during the 20^th century. He has recently co-edited Spirit of the Grassroots People: Seeking Justice for Indigenous Survivors of Canada’s Colonial Education System with McGill-Queen’s University Press. His other research interests include teaching history in the Anthropocene, Indigenous education, and the ancient history of Indigenous people in North America. ([email protected])

Sara Karn

Sara Karn is a PhD Candidate in the Faculty of Education, Queen’s University. Her doctoral research explores the place and potential of historical empathy in Canadian history education. Her research interests include historical thinking, citizenship education, environmental and climate change education, and the history of education in Canada. She is also a K-12 Ontario teacher and has led experiential learning programs to teach high school students about the social and ecological impacts of warfare in Europe. ([email protected]).