The Story of Climate Action Pedagogy (CAP)
An example of emergent strategy (a.k.a. "small is all") in action
Last week, I shared with you that my word of the year is incremental, inspired by Sage Crump’s definition of emergent strategy (“Emergent strategy is amplifying the importance of the incremental to impact the monumental.”) Today, I want to give you an example of what that looks like in practice.
Next week, I’ll be offering the third iteration of a workshop called Climate Action Pedagogy, CAP to a group of educators. This is a seventy-five minute co-working session that helps educators weave climate action principles into their existing courses, regardless of discipline. If climate action instruction is happening at all in education, it’s often relegated to science courses and departments. CAP recognizes that just as all jobs are (must be) climate jobs (a popular mantra amongst climate activists), so too must all courses be climate courses. CAP recognizes that for every educator ready and willing to infuse climate action into their courses, hundreds, potentially thousands, of students can be reached.
That idea of reaching thousands of students is no longer just a vision for CAP written in a slide deck. That vision is being realized. Hundreds of faculty and staff have gone through the CAP workshops and brought climate action into their courses and to their students— English courses, psychology courses, information technology courses.
Too often we tell these stories of realizing a vision and ignore the small, first step that put the whole thing into motion. I want to tell you the story of that small, first step, because I bet there is some small, first step inside of you too, waiting to be realized. Today, I want to tell this story to amplify the importance of the incremental to impact the monumental.
Remember that first wave of freedom we got when we realized the vaccines really worked and we might actually beat this thing?
A few months later, though vaccines obviously continued to protect us against its worst impacts, COVID had mutated. Enter Omicron. To have survived that first, long eighteen months! To have returned to some semblance of routine and normalcy! To have another wave break upon us. Well, it was too much. One day in November of 2021, I was doomscrolling in the middle of that Omicron wave, reading about some conference in New York City. I saw pictures of hordes of people on an escalator, all maskless.
“We’re doomed,” I thought. (I mean, doomscrolling is an accurate name, right?)
Pandemics, you see, are terrifying all on their own. But what’s even more terrifying? That the disease of pandemics isn’t even the disease — pandemics are also a symptom. A symptom of climate change. Would we have pandemics without climate change? Sure. But climate change is like throwing gasoline on the pandemic fire. We can expect more and worse pandemics as long as climate change proceeds unchecked.
In the midst of Omicron, this double-whammy hit me hard. I got down on the floor, which I sometimes do when it feels like there’s nowhere else to go. Eventually, because I’m a geek, I pulled out a copy of one of Martin Seligman’s recent articles on learned helplessness, as one does. For those not familiar, learned helplessness is a theory that explains why animals trapped in cages long enough will simply lay down and stop fighting. In the face of futile circumstances, they surrender. In this most recent article, Seligman argued that this surrender isn’t s learned behavior at all. Rather, it’s our default. If an animal senses that fight, flight, and fawn are no longer working to keep it alive, it plays dead to conserve energy and take its best shot at survival. Hope, Seligman argues, is what overrides this default programming.
I scribbled in the margins: “Two choices: accept futility or delude myself?”
I had therapy later that day, and showed up with that journal article in hand, as one does, and posed this question to my therapist. “It seems to me that our only choices are hopelessness or delusion, so which one do you think is better?” I asked.
She, as therapists do, said something along the lines of, “Okay. Well. I see how you might feel that way. Do you think it’s possible that there’s a third option?”
“Yes, okay. Maybe there’s a third option.”
For the remainder of the session, we spoke about some facts. Fact one: there are millions of intelligent and caring people working to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. Fact two: while there are many things outside of my control, it was within my control to ask myself the question, “What can I do, today, right now, to help?” Fact three: I cannot predict the future.
Later that night, I listened to a podcast episode my therapist had recommended that had helped her feel a bit more hopeful about our chances of survival. While listening, I doodled in my art journal. The trick, I realized, was to stop trying to help in the way others were helping, and to focus on helping my way, using my unique skills and energy. What would that look like? If all jobs really were climate jobs, then my job was a climate job too. The job I already had.
I work in faculty development, helping educators to feel well and teach well. What would it look like to bring climate action into that work? What if I helped college faculty start weaving climate action into their existing courses? That I could do! That is my wheelhouse. I didn’t need to take climate action like anyone else was taking climate action. It was actually preferable that I didn’t. I could instead offer my unique talents to this movement.
In the span of about thirty minutes, I wrote out the entire vision of CAP in my journal, then transferred it into a Google Doc, that November night in 2021 during the early days of the Omicron wave.
For the next two years, the work of CAP ebbed and flowed. Initially, I was intent on partnering with a climate action organization to bring CAP into the world. I met with a half dozen, imagining that they would have ample resources to support CAP’s launch. Reader, sadly, they did not. They were even less resourced than higher ed. Some of the organizations I met with were a shop of one and a half people. That sent me back into hiding a bit. How could climate action organizations not be flush with funds to support, you know, saving the human species?!
I had all but given up on CAP until the spring of 2023, when my son, an eighth-grader, put together a climate action themed edition of his middle school newspaper. As editor, he worried over it. Would he have enough contributors? Would they get their submissions in on time? Would it be good enough? I was the motherly refrain in the background reminding him, “Do what you can. Your best is good enough. Focus on what you can control. Surrender the rest.”
The students released their newspaper, and as I read through it, I was overwhelmed with feelings of guilt and sadness.
I could not look my son in the eye and tell him that it would all be okay. I could not look my son in the eye and tell him that our species would survive the next hundred years. The next twenty years even. I could not look my son in the eye and say with honesty that I’d done my part to try and make it better. In that moment, I’d given up on CAP because it seemed futile. But what was bigger than that feeling of hopelessness was my desire to be able to look my son in the eye and say, “I tried. I tried my best.”
That day, I dug CAP up from its virtual burial place. I reached out to some contacts and started new conversations about getting it out into the world, however imperfect that might look. We should never let perfect be the enemy of good, I would argue, but that’s never been more true. Too many of us are letting perfect be the enemy of good in our climate action work, worried we’re imposters or that it won’t make a difference or that we simply don’t know what we’re doing.
To hell with that. I would try. I would try my best. To hell with learned helplessness or default helplessness. To hell with Seligman. I for one, plan to go down swinging, futile or not. I don’t even need hope, though it’s nice to have once in a while. I can fight on the fumes of stubborn persistence.
The first CAP co-working session and self-paced, online course, launched in June of 2023. The next co-working was held in August 2023. Again, our next session takes place on January 17th, next week.
Hundreds of faculty from around the world have joined us in CAP to weave climate action principles into their courses. Last month, two faculty from an institution in the Netherlands reached out to me about CAP. They are submitting a grant application to receive funding in support of training campus faculty on bringing climate action into their classrooms. CAP will be the foundation for their model. Like many grants, there is an expectation that this pilot program will serve as a model for other institutions to mimic. Imagine every institution in the Netherlands, in Europe even, using CAP to support faculty and students in taking climate action.
CAP is here. It’s happening. It’s reaching hundreds of faculty, soon to be thousands. It’s reaching thousands of students, soon to be tens of thousands. And it started with me on the floor, hopeless and scared, but just willing enough to take the next, smallest, best step. And then the next. And the next.
In her book, Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown writes, “The crisis is everywhere, massive massive massive. And we are small.”
Read that again.
Again.
Again.
Read it until you remember. As amb later says, “Small is good. Small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.”)
Read it again.
“And we are small.”
Then, begin.