All Eyes on New Jersey: The Future of Climate Education is Here
By Dr. Radhika Iyengar, Director of Education at the Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, and Chair of the Mission 4.7 Secretariat
Mission 4.7 calls on education facilitators to bring about Transformative Education as defined by its two core concepts: sustainability and justice. Achieving Transformative Education requires vision, planning, implementation, and funding. The State of New Jersey in the United States is attempting to make this a reality.
In March 2020, New Jersey’s Governor and the First Lady announced that climate education will be added to the formal K-12 school curriculum, not as a separate subject but integrated across all subjects, starting with science and followed by social science. To facilitate this integration, the NJ Department of Education has taken the New Jersey Student Learning Standards (NJSLS) and mapped all the standards to climate topics. For instance, in the elementary science curriculum, four climate education themes have been mapped to the NJSLS: climate/environment, natural resources, human impacts on earth, and global climate change. These themes, along with the standards, are mapped to science lessons for each grade that adhere to the existing curricular calendar. The school year is divided into three trimesters, with physical sciences taught in the first, earth and space in the second, and life sciences taught in the third trimester.
The pandemic years have been used as preparatory years to make this vision possible. The State created a list of valuable curricular resources on a website exclusively dedicated to climate education integration. The ripple effect has been seen in the districts that compiled their resources in conjunction with the State resource site. For instance, under the leadership of Mrs. Chrystie Young, Millburn District has its own climate education resource website for more local and on-the-ground use by teachers. The resource site is updated regularly and the information about local events and resources are distributed to science coordinators in the District.
The State intends to strengthen the core principles of implementation across all the districts in compliance with the suggestions recommended by The College of New Jersey School of Education, and the New Jersey Schools Board Association. In March 2022, the Governor proposed his FY2023 budget, which includes $5 million in climate change education grants to NJ’s K-12 schools! These grants will support schools by providing funding for technical assistance, professional development opportunities, instructional materials, and evaluation strategies.
New Jersey’s climate education work is not an island--it sits under the State’s umbrella agenda for climate action. NGOs such as Sustainable Jersey, NJ Audubon, and ANJEE have supported the school systems by providing teacher professional opportunities and a platform to cross-pollinate ideas. The Columbia University Center for Sustainable Development’s Eco-Ambassador program also supports education for sustainable development efforts by working in communities and directly reaching youth through their summer research projects and citizen science approach. Many of these organizations meet at the Annual New Jersey Climate Education Summit to present their ideas and engage in discussions to take them forward. Such fora also encourages students to connect with NGOs such as the Sierra Club, and involve them in citizen education on environmental laws.
A whole ecosystem of NGOs; cross-departmental collaboration between the Department of Environmental Protection and Department of Education; and many active Eco-Ambassadors, school principals, and teachers were necessary to bring together the building blocks of Transformative Education in New Jersey.The Climate Standards are all set to be integrated by Sept 2022 in New Jersey schools. The standards will help fill the green jobs that the State is creating with the right talent and skilled professionals graduating from the school systems and entering green job-related courses at the college level.
To help New Jersey bring in a genuinely Transformational Education requires the marriage of climate education and Social-Emotional-Learning (SEL) Standards with a justice lens. New Jersey has a strong focus on SEL and inclusive education directives, such as LGBTQ standards. A cross-standard referencing matrix will help build lesson plans that use the Systems Approach to address all these topics simultaneously. Additionally, to incorporate the concept of 21st-century skills, UNESCO’s Learning Objectives Framework might be particularly helpful. The pandemic has taught us many things; one of them is that we need to care for the people and the planet. A practical framework that helps us to do the same is SDG 4.7. Adopting the framework of the SDGs, and particularly SDG 4.7, will help create future global citizens educated locally in New Jersey.
In taking these first steps, with its top-down policy and funding aimed at implementing the integration of climate standards, New Jersey is taking a significant step ahead of other States in the country and internationally in bringing about Transformative Education for a sustainable future.