The Flight Free Podcast: Confessions of an Eco-Hypocrite

Positives

• This podcast will help students to see that individual change can make a difference, but that no one can change the system by themselves.
  

Additional Prerequisites

• Teachers may want to explain the nuances between guilt and shame to students before playing the podcast.
• The podcast can be downloaded.

Differentiation

• Ethics and psychology classes could discuss how guilt and shame can have positive and negative applications. Students could think of examples of how feeling shame or guilt can make a person re-evaluate their decisions or take positive actions, as well as examples of how shame and guilt can make a person feel powerless.
• Before listening to the podcast, students could make a list of individual actions that they take to help the environment and a list of individual actions that they wish they could take to help the environment. Students could discuss their lists with a partner and explain how they feel when they look at the two lists. After listening to the podcast, students could write a personal reflection on their lists and what they learned from the podcast.
• Other resources on this topic include this PBS video on feeling guilty about climate change and this video on how guilt-inducing messaging about climate change is not very effective.