In this video, climate activist Luisa Neubauer discusses her journey to becoming a climate activist and explains why all people should become climate activists.
She talks about attending a UN Climate Conference, striking for the climate with Greta Thunberg, and gives the following advice for becoming a climate activist:
Believe that you are capable of being a climate activist.
Spread the word.
Get other people involved.
Take the work of climate activism seriously.
Teaching Tips
Positives
Neubauer is an engaging speaker. Her speech will show students that young people can have a voice in climate action.
Pictures and graphs illustrate the points made.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should be comfortable reading and interpreting graphs.
There is a transcript of the video available in 20 languages and the video can be downloaded for use offline, which may help teachers with spotty internet connections.
This would be a great video to show in a social studies class. Students could make personal plans for taking climate action.
Teachers could pause on the graphs that appear at 1 minute, 27 seconds and at 1 minute, 42 seconds to ask students the following questions:
Which graph would be most impactful for people who are not convinced that climate change is happening? Why?
How could these graphs be used together to teach someone about the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
What makes these graphs compelling?
Students could also create their own Ted Talks about an issue related to global warming, human impacts on the planet, or climate change.
The video gives detailed elaboration on the need to engage in climate activism, fossil fuel divestment, and environmental sustainability. This is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-5 Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Civics
D2.Civ.1.6-8 Distinguish the powers and responsibilities of citizens, political parties, interest groups, and the media in a variety of governmental and nongovernmental contexts.
Dimension 4: Taking Informed Action
D4.7.6-8 Assess their individual and collective capacities to take action to address local, regional, and global problems, taking into account a range of possible levers of power, strategies, and potential outcomes.
D4.7.9-12 Assess options for individual and collective action to address local, regional, and global problems by engaging in self-reflection, strategy identification, and complex causal reasoning.
