It was late in the afternoon, and while there were a good number of people there, within minutes of Allen Webb’s opening presentation for why discussion and study of climate change belongs in an English classroom, I felt I should be running through the halls of NCTE gathering everyone for this roundtable session because… well… should we really be wasting our time talking about much else??

As with so many brilliant ideas I glean from NCTE and NYSEC, I brought this genre and topic home to my classes and to my department. It is a goal in progress, but I am happy to report we are in fact progressing.

Kerry Baird and I both teach 12AP Literature & Composition and have been doing work with literary theory for many years. We’d been adding ecocriticism already, and knew we wanted to do more. Thus, a climate fiction unit was born.

Kerry:
In 2023, I began to feel the hopelessness of my students more than ever before. The irreparable damage left by the pandemic, contentious politics, and school shootings kept begging the question: How do we help students realize their own potential when we are feeling just as hopeless? My mind traveled to the legendary picture of Greta Thunberg sitting on the ground outside of her school next to her sign “SKOLSTREJK FOR KLIMATET.” A fifteen year old began Fire Drill Fridays, a global movement for climate health.

Thunberg had just published The Climate Book; the essays she curated were often beyond the scope of my complete understanding, but Thunberg’s own essays emitted a compassion and an urgency that would inspire students to take action beyond the classroom. Inspiring stories such as hers are powerful, but I needed more for my students. I needed to empower my students to be in positions to make sustainable change.

How We Began

In February of 2023 Allen Webb and Mark Sulzer (University of Cincinnati professor) were kind enough to do a virtual reprisal of their NCTE 2022 roundtable Connecting English Language Arts & The Climate Crisis with our HS English Department on why and how to approach climate fiction with our students.

After ordering recommended titles for our students and reading Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents (Beach, Share, & Webb 2017), we decided on our approach to clifi. We would facilitate Climate Fiction Book Clubs* with a series of learning endeavors focused on ecocriticism, climate warrior awareness, and climate health and hope.

What We Did

In short, we developed a unit that included the following:

• An introduction to ecocriticism using The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein;
• An AP Free Response Q2 style prose analysis students would do with a passage they chose from their book (they annotated and made notes on meaning and significance of various elements of author’s craft; we did not write a full essay);
• Side quests to learn about climate change and climate warriors doing good work in the world and roundtable presentations to share with peers;
• An activism endeavor we called “Climate Health Hope Projects” where students could form their own partnerships with peers to invent an advocacy project they would research, present for feedback, and then actually execute;
• An independent ecocritical analysis of the novel they read for their book club.

Reflection

Most of this has gone well. We’ve struggled with timelines, enhancements we couldn’t not include like the recent COP28 convention that just happened to be going on while our students were researching climate warriors, and with having students believe we meant what we said when we indicated their advocacy projects had to actually be executed. We realized that perhaps too much of school is still existing in the hypothetical for students – they’re practicing / training / prepping for the “real world” rather than engaging with it (a topic for another day).

We are excited that we leaned into a genre that is out of our comfort zone, for making education actionable, for encouraging sustainable change in hearts and minds through lessons and study and writing that is relevant beyond the walls of a classroom.

We are planning a day together to revisit this unit, our plans, our students’ work, our timeline, our scope, and our limitations so we can use this unit again next year, officially adding it to our AP Literature & Composition curriculum. We are looking forward to that day to pause and regroup, as we’ve had to remind ourselves repeatedly that it’s not only our students’ first time, it’s also ours. FFTs as Brené Brown calls them – “Effing First Times.” They are moments of growth, of the excitement of possibility in relation to plausibility, and of affirmation as we remember our cause is far larger than our egos. Our students need this growth and these moments from us; they need this and other units centered on climate and ecocriticism.

And they need them now, FFTs be damned. As the adage goes – There is no Planet B – and we all know it.

* Titles our students read included:
Pacifica by Kristen Simmons
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
Cloud Cuckooland by Anthony Doerr
Dry by Neil Shusterman
Ship Breaker by Paulo Bacigalupi
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Love in the Time of Global Warming by Francesca Lia Block

Michelle G. Bulla is a high school English teacher and the 9-12 department chair at Monroe-Woodbury High School in southern Orange County, NY. She’s also a Teacher Consultant with the Hudson Valley Writing Project and a member of the Executive Board for NYSEC (mbulla@nysecteach.org). You can read about more of her work on her blog at www.TranscendingPedagogy.com and find her on Twitter @china93doll.

Kerry Baird has been an English teacher for the past 24 years, the last five have been enjoyed at Monroe-Woodbury High School in Orange County, New York. Her areas of special interest are teaching in the affective domain, exploring literature and topics related to acculturated stress, reading and discussing antiracist literature, inspiring creative, historical redress writing, and guiding young authors to change the world.