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By Liam Beretsky-Jewell

Note: This is the second of a series of articles exploring climate change education in Somerville Public Schools. The first article can be found here.

There’s currently a large discrepancy between Somerville High School (SHS) students’ interest in learning about climate science and the actual number of students who choose to enroll in climate-related courses. Although a recent survey issued to over 100 SHS students revealed that a majority are interested in receiving more, enrollment numbers in the environmental science classes offered by the school continue to drop. To address this gap, some district faculty have discussed making climate education mandatory in some way – either through additional course requirements or integration into currently required courses. The high school does not currently require students to take any courses in which climate change is a central theme. This may come as somewhat of a surprise — Massachusetts has some of the nation’s most ambitious climate and energy goals, which include reaching “at least net-zero statewide greenhouse gas emissions” by the year 2050, according to the state’s Clean Energy and Climate Plan.

Because of class scheduling constraints, many faculty and students believe it is impractical to make the high school’s standalone environmental science classes mandatory. Currently, these classes only count for science credits. However, some have raised the idea of creating multidisciplinary classes with a focus on the environment that extend beyond science and can be taken for other kinds of credits.

“The next steps are to [think] about how we can put more of this content within the core science classes so that students are getting exposed to it that way, but we’re also really interested in partnering with other departments in the school … [climate] is a very broad topic” explained Marianna Hosking, the SHS Science Department chair.

Six years ago, SHS offered an environmental history course, which was co-taught by a social studies teacher, Kara Carpenter, and a science teacher, Maureen Quigley. “Four or five people were taking it for history credit. When we did like subject-specific things, [the history students] went with Ms. Carpenter to a different space, and I did science-specific things, like experiments and labs [with the students taking the class for science credit]. Then we came back together and shared our results,” explained Quigley, adding that the experience was powerful and interesting.

However, this interdisciplinary course also had its challenges. “A lot of colleges and universities didn’t understand what environmental history was as a class, so they didn’t know how to deal with it in terms of credits and transcripts,” she explained. “When you make a change like that, you just have to persist and educate colleagues that we’re doing something kind of innovative and new.” Additionally, this class generated less interest than teachers had hoped. When Quigley tried to reinstate the class following the COVID-19 pandemic, she was told that SHS “[didn’t] have the budget to pay two teachers to be in the same room at the same time,” given the low number of students enrolled in the class. Department chair Hosking explained that she is open to exploring other multi-department electives, which would hopefully generate more interest than environmental history: “We tried, but I’m not done trying yet.”

Another Somerville Public Schools (SPS) admin, Jason Behrens, agreed about the importance of teaching climate education across multiple disciplines: “Scientists are often the ones who are publishing papers … but you’re going to need a whole range of skills in order to address the problem.” He envisions climate as a topic that could follow students from class to class.

Behrens has led a climate committee composed of SPS teachers and administrators to assess the current status of climate education within the district and explore opportunities to increase its integration into curricula. The committee plans to share its findings with the school committee this summer. Their work includes issuing surveys to teachers about their role in pushing climate education and reviewing the state’s curriculum frameworks through a climate lens, with the goal of eventually piloting a climate curriculum at SPS.

At the state level, curriculum frameworks are developed by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), the agency responsible for establishing learning standards for public school students. Frameworks outline these standards on a subject-by-subject basis and generally haven’t made climate change a central or explicit focus of the K-12 curriculum, with very few projects or activities that focus on the topic. For instance, the Science and Technology/Engineering Framework–a 197-page document last updated in 2016–mentions the term “climate change” 14 times. By comparison, the term “radiation” is mentioned 14 times, “molecules” is mentioned 40 times, and “magnetic” 30 times.

Since the state’s standards don’t emphasize climate change, it would largely be up to the district and individual teachers to supplement these documents on their own. This could include training teachers to incorporate climate topics into their lesson plans. Quigley, the SHS environmental science teacher, was open to helping “[lead] a group of other educators to try to integrate climate science … I could at least help coach them along the way to what would work for them in their classes.” However, she acknowledged that “there’s not a ton of wiggle room” in existing curricula, given the length of existing DESE frameworks. Additionally, “a lot of teachers, especially the newer teachers … tend to feel a little overwhelmed, and if you’re consistently asked to add more, it can get to be too much.” However, she believes this could be partially mitigated “if there was somebody there to help… to refine what you

already are [teaching] and give it a climate angle or climate connections as opposed to reinventing the wheel.” This could include providing climate access points in the curriculum teachers already use, modifying open-response questions, or adding an occasional data point or graph to lessons. “Every subject has potential connections to climate and the environment,” she explained.

In recent years, SPS has had success piloting a home-grown climate curriculum in some middle school classrooms throughout the city and facilitating discussion among teachers from different subjects surrounding climate. Eventually, these initiatives could make their way to the high school level, but doing so may be more challenging. The reasons for this will be explored in the next article, featuring Assistant Superintendent Jessica Boston Davis.