One of the challenges of teaching geography lies in demonstrating how abstract concepts apply to the world that our students inhabit. It’s equally challenging to do the opposite, and show the wider principles behind their daily experiences. One area in which we see this tension played out is the teaching of climate change, and especially the role of individuals in trying to mitigate its effects.
This article will examine how best to teach pupils about their carbon footprint and relate the idea of carbon emissions to their everyday choices, helping them to understand the role that their own lifestyle plays in climate change.
Ground your teaching in a wider scheme of work
First, consider the place of this lesson in a wider scheme of work. Before pupils can understand their own role in global climate change they need to understand the role of carbon emissions.
The level of detail you go into will of course depend on which key stage you are teaching, but at the very least your students will need to understand that an increased concentration of carbon in the atmosphere prevents heat radiated from the Earth from escaping into space, and that this insulation causes the planet to warm.
You may also need to address two common misconceptions: that global climate change is somehow related to the hole in the ozone layer, and that climate change means consistently hotter and drier weather.
Once this learning is in place, you can begin your lesson on students’ own role in climate change. A good place to start is by recapping the broader context, challenging pupils to annotate an outline diagram showing the process of the greenhouse effect and using peer assessment to improve their answers.
Encourage students to think beyond the obvious
When you move on to discuss the ways in which daily activities contribute to carbon emissions, try to draw out some of the less obvious points.
One simple way to tackle this is to ask the class to list what they did from the moment they woke up to the moment they arrived at their first lesson. Use their suggestions to draw up a common list (shower, look at phone, eat breakfast, get driven to school and so on), and then ask them to work in pairs to figure out how each activity might cause carbon emissions.
The aim is to show that we need to consider more than just the obvious uses of electricity and petrol, and think about things like how water is heated and the carbon emissions from food production.
Choose your carbon calculator
The next step is for pupils to calculate their own carbon footprints. Ideally, they will use an online calculator but if need be they could work it out at home and bring the information in with them, or you could do this exercise together as a class.
There is a huge array of online calculators but they need selecting with care. Some give very precise results but require pupils to provide a lot of detailed information about their exact electricity use and fuel mileage, which they’re unlikely to possess.
One of the best calculators is produced by the World Wildlife Fund. It takes quite simple measurements but over a wide range of lifestyle choices, and tells you not only your total carbon emissions but also how this compares to the national average and the world average.
Look carefully at lifestyle factors
The next step is for pupils to compare their footprint to others in their class and to try to work out why theirs is higher or lower.
Find the students with the highest and the lowest footprints and question them about their lifestyle - what has led to their score? Ask pupils to re-run the calculations to see what changes would have the biggest impact on their carbon emissions.
The final step is to put this information together and apply it to a range of case studies. One possible task would be to create profiles of several people with differing lifestyles and ask students to rank them in order of their emissions. (Make sure the profiles are sufficiently complex, in order to demonstrate that a wide range of factors can influence carbon emissions.)
For a follow-up task, you could ask students to write a brief report advising the person with the highest footprint on how to reduce it; they also need to understand the difficulties people face in adopting a more sustainable lifestyle, for example by changing their diet. Pupils could look at the arguments put forward by people who worry about going vegan or those who don’t want to change their driving habits.
Their last task would be to apply what they have learned to writing a short report on the barriers to reducing personal carbon emissions.
Look beyond the domestic
Responding to climate change is not just a domestic issue. The residential sector is responsible for only 13 per cent of carbon emissions, with the bulk of emissions being produced by industry and vehicles. One option for taking your class’s learning further is to look at how pupils can influence local businesses and the local community to address their behaviour.
But if managing climate change is about more than switching off the lights and not leaving devices to charge over-night, working out their own carbon footprints can help pupils understand the role that their own lifestyle plays in climate change.
Mark Enser is head of geography at Heathfield Community College in East Sussex and blogs at Teachreal.wordpress.com
