Earth-Based Teaching: How to Bring Environmental Awareness into Any Course

The arrival of spring coincides with a number of Earth-focused celebrations, from Earth Day to World Climate Justice Education Week. While many of us acknowledge the urgency of incorporating environmental justice into our teaching, few of us have the capacity to add new content to already packed syllabi. Here are several ways in which instructors across disciplines can advance environmental awareness without having to reinvent their courses:

1. Project tie-ins: environmental concerns (climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss) affect every dimension of contemporary life. Students in any field, from accounting to philosophy to fashion design, can explore relevant environmental and social impacts and imagine possibilities for remediation, mitigation, and adaptation.
2. Make space for reflection: conversations about environmental justice are happening across academic disciplines and professional fields - but don't always make their way into the classroom. How might you encourage reflection and conversation about the environmental costs and affordances of the work your students will be doing in their courses, Co-op appointments, and professional futures? How might you address the environmental cost of AI tools?
3. Invite guest speakers: Drexel University boasts an impressive number of faculty working on environmental and climate projects across academic and creative disciplines. Consider inviting a Drexel colleague to visit your classroom as a guest speaker, panelist, or informal conversation partner.
4. Consider pedagogy: environmental education is not just about content. It also involves cultivating life-affirming habits of mind (attentiveness, ecosystemic awareness, mutual respect) as well as creating just and sustainable learning environments. In a world dominated by the demands of speed and efficiency, can we find alternative models in Indigenous approaches to teaching? Can we invite our students to slow down and attend more thoughtfully to their relationships with each other and with the greater-than-human world?
5. Go outside: the many mental health benefits of spending time outdoors are well-documented. As the weather warms, can you find ways to take your students outside for conversations, field trips, or out-of-the-box outdoor learning activities? (See, for example, Professor Rosemary McGunnigle-Gonzales's chalk timeline.) If you're teaching online, or simply cannot leave your classroom/lab, can you assign homework tasks that involve outdoor time (e.g., photos of local infrastructure, audio capture of local environments, or video-diaries of excursions relevant to your subject)? Or invite the outdoors inside by opening the window or bringing in a plant? Can you bring more awareness of embodiment to your teaching in ways that are inclusive and mindful of students' mobility and mental health needs? In her book Minding Bodies. How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning (2021) Susan Hrach offers multiple examples of embodied in pedagogy in action; see Hrach's Intentional Teaching interview for a quick digest of her arguments.

If you're looking for more ideas and/or inspiration, several professional associations offer materials for educators interested in cultivating environmental awareness across academic disciplines. The North American Association for Climate Education (NAACE) curates educational resources focusing on climate justice and health, legislative efforts to improve climate literacy, and research into effective education strategies. The Regeneration website includes a collection of solution-oriented materials, organized thematically for ease of use. The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) maintains a robust Teaching Resources Database where academic instructors across disciplines can find examples of activities, projects, lesson plans, and syllabi. Finally, Drexel's own Climate Pedagogy Incubator supports faculty interested in environmental justice education and community-based learning.