The world is burning. And flooding. And experiencing “unprecedented” weather events and trends at an alarming pace.

Learning about these events and how they act as symptoms of the larger climate crisis should hold an essential place in our lives and educational contexts if we want any chance at curtailing a full-on climate catastrophe.

This post serves as an introduction to my latest passion project: Eco-Education.

Why Eco-Education?

People live and learn within specific contexts. When a student enters the classroom, whether it’s economics, English literature, or calculus, they enter the room with everything about who they are and where they come from. They enter the classroom with all of the anxieties and joys of their specific contexts.

For many students, part of their context is a concern for an ever-changing climate and the implications climate change has on every aspect of their lives. Whether instructors and professors and educators address these concerns in their classroom or not, students are likely concerned, as they should be.

What is Eco-Education?

Ok, so what is Eco-Education?

Eco-Education is a passion project by which I hope to provide a bank of resources for educators and students to engage with climate change and the climate crisis through authentic media.

When it comes down to it, Eco-Education is what I can do to immediately address one tiny piece of the climate crisis puzzle.

Since my background is in English education, the resources I’ve started to put together were created with adult English learners in mind. However, the resources may be useful for educators and students in other areas as well.

I hope to build a resource with materials for a wide variety of language levels and interests related to climate change and the climate crisis.

Anyone should feel free to use and adapt the materials for any teaching and learning context! If you need a little help imagining how the resources might be useful for your context, feel free to contact me (on social media or by filling out this form).

Learning Goals

The purpose of this passion project is to educate, ignite passion, and support engagement as learners and educators work with content related to climate change and the climate crisis.

The Eco-Education resources will help students engage with media related to climate change and the climate crisis by providing preview discussion or reflection questions, key vocabulary, reading/listening guide questions, comprehension questions, and higher-level questions that ask learners to dig deeper into the content.

Accessing Materials

The Eco-Education materials currently exist in Google folders available online. I will continue adding resources as I finish putting them together.

Each file can be downloaded and adapted or used as is. The texts (articles, audio, or images) are available online and linked in the Eco-Education materials. If a text is not freely available online, it will be noted in the materials. This may be the case if I put materials related to published books or other media (Netflix videos, etc) together.

Eco-Education by Crystal Rose-Wainstock is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Let’s do this!

I appreciate you taking the time to learn about Eco-Education resources. I invite you to browse materials in the Eco-Education folders and subscribing to receive updates about new materials as they become available.