Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference

"The scientists and engineers have done their work, providing a timely warning on climate change and producing the technologies like solar panels that would help take it on. It's the rest of us that have so far failed, and it's largely a failure of...imagination, precisely the reason that we have English class. This book will help many teachers understand their craft in light of the planet's great crisis."

Bill McKibben, Editor, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

"I'm always looking for topical and innovative subjects to discuss with my high school students. This book can be used both as a good resource to justify the teaching of climate change in my curriculum and to help me teach it as well."

Cara Arver, English Teacher/English Department Chair, Centreville High School, USA

"This book is fantastic!  It is beautifully written, thorough in its approach to content, and powerfully presented. We need this book!  It provides a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the crises we are facing and how ELA teachers can begin to address those problems with their students today.  Students will be awakened to an important critical analysis as well as what they can and should do to respond in their own communities.  I applaud Beach, Share, and Webb!"

Rebecca A. Martusewizc, Eastern Michigan University, USA

"Too often, climate change education is regarded as the responsibility of science teachers, and occasionally of social studies teachers. In Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents, Richard Beach, Jeff Share, and Allen Webb argue that it is the urgent responsibility of English teachers to help students think critically about, and take action on, "the issue of our age, climate change and environmental justice." The authors lay out compelling arguments for why that is the case, but perhaps most significantly, they offer readers a treasury of novels, non-fiction books, stories, films, and teaching activities that show how to bring climate issues to life in the Language Arts classroom...Through classroom examples and resource suggestions, Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents offers teachers tools to cut through those modes of concealment."

Bill Bigelow, Linda Christensen, and Deborah Menkart, Rethinking Schools