“More Than ‘Something Else We Need to Fit Into Our Day’”

Over fifteen years ago, on vacation in Nevada, I went on a tour of the Hoover Dam and observed "bathtub rings" on the canyon walls of Lake Mead. Coming back home to the Midwest, I couldn't stop thinking about the dropping water levels and started to understand just how important water was to… well, everything! It was the first time I really started understanding the connections between nature and human impacts on the environment.

After more than two decades as a classroom teacher, I became the first and only climate education coach for Milwaukee Public Schools, supporting over 4,500 teachers in 145 schools. In this position, I was tasked with integrating environmental literacy and sustainability education into grades K–12 across all subjects. At first, that task seemed daunting. But I knew there had to be ways this could be part of the work teachers were already doing.

I had a vision of one place where teachers could find everything they needed with only a "few clicks of the mouse." Around that time I was introduced to SubjectToClimate, and together with them, Victoria Rydberg-Nania of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and educators across the state, we created the Wisconsin Climate Education Hub. SubjectToClimate gave me hope that the district-wide responsibility I was charged with was not only possible, but could also be accomplished in a way that respected teachers' time.

Now part of my job is teaching teachers how to bring climate into their existing curriculum, and SubjectToClimate is an important part of that integration piece. Recently, while I was walking a cohort of educators through the hub, one teacher exclaimed, "This is just making me a better teacher. I now understand how this type of integration can work with all subjects!"

Not long ago, I took a class outside to investigate a tree in the schoolyard, using one of the hub’s lessons that I wrote called Trees: My Connection with Nature. One student touched the bark, finished drawing what she was observing, and said, "This tree has been here every day, but I never really noticed it before, and now I see all the cool parts that this tree has!" It was the same feeling I had at Lake Mead, seeing something that had been there all along.

“This tree has been here every day, but I never really noticed it before, and now I see all the cool parts that this tree has!”

Bringing climate into your classroom is more than "something else we need to fit into our day." It is about teaching students to observe the world they live in, think about the connections between people and the planet, and ultimately steward and protect the world that sustains us all.