Climate and Sustainability Teaching Fellows

Climate change is often framed as science’s demands of government, outside of politics and legal norms. However, climate and human rights activists are joining their claims in the political sphere and pressing for the right to a livable environment as part of universal human rights. I’ve incorporated that expanded definition of rights into the course and challenge students to brainstorm what a rights-based understanding of climate change advocacy looks like.

In this introductory DOCST class, students engaged with themes connected to the climate crisis in workshops, engagements with visiting artists, and through creating their own semester-long photography projects. Students compared and contrasted how different forms of early photography used processes based in the natural world to create images (salt prints, collodion processes, silver nitrate), and the environmental concerns of these processes. We experimented with making original cyanotype photographs as a means to create non-mechanical images in the natural world using sunlight. Through presentations, students reflected on how documentary practices can inform and inspire social change, including around the climate action, as well as the problematic aspects of documentary methodologies and mass communication strategies. Students met with, among others, visiting artist Earl Dotter, who recorded the dangerous working conditions of Appalachian coal miners in the 1960s and 1970s, and discussed with him the ethics of documenting the human faces of climate and environmental change. Throughout the semester, students worked on their own photographic projects documenting issues or communities of importance to them.

This survey course covers a broad range of environmental issues and solutions, giving students an opportunity to understand the root causes of environmental challenges and to explore potentially innovative ways to address them. This semester, we engaged in a semester-long project on climate change, framed by Duke's Climate Commitment. Students learned the science of climate change, used models to predict future change based on various scenarios, and explored their own carbon and ecological footprints with class activities. They were also required to attend campus events related to climate and sustainability, have a climate conversation with a family member or friend, and compare Duke's commitment to those made by other universities and corporations. This work culminated in our Hashtagathon - a poster session-like event that featured students presenting their hashtag to answer the question: what is the student role in the Duke Climate Commitment? By using climate change and the Commitment as a frame for the semester, we were able to take more time to explore the complexities of both the issue and the solution, and to make it relevant to students by focusing on their role and their Duke community.

In French 111, our work with climate and sustainability began with a consideration of how the topics figured (or didn’t) into our existing course materials – students took a critical look at the ways in which climate and sustainability-related themes appeared in the class’s published textbook, and argued that there was a tendency to focus more on individual actions than on community responses to climate change. From there, we worked with an extended unit designed to consider questions related to community-based responses to climate change. Students first viewed the French documentary Demain (Tomorrow), which is introduced but not extensively discussed in the course materials. Students spent two class days discussing the film’s content, tone, and general approach. We compared and contrasted this film with other climate-related documentaries that they had seen, and also critiqued the film’s focus on community-related responses to climate change from the Global North. During subsequent class days, students broke into small groups to explore one of three case studies that presented additional community-related responses to climate change in the French speaking world – from the grandes écoles movement to refuse to work for major pollutors to eco-tourism in Gabon to environmental justice activism related to chlordecone poisoning in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Students prepared a short, informal presentation of their case study for their classmates, contextualized the climate-related concern that it responded to, and highlighted how community-level (vs individual action) initiatives were at play. This unit concluded with a three-part assessment called an integrated performance assessment, in which students integrated their study of language and of climate-related content to read and then discuss in small groups a recent article on youth climate movements. This three-part assessment concluded with an in-class essay in which students discussed a cause about which they felt passionate. These causes ranged from the social (access to healthy food vs food deserts) to the environmental (national parks as a vehicle for preservation of natural spaces; ecotourism and its impact on glaciers in the Alps).

With a goal of deepening students’ understanding of the cultural and community elements of inclusive sustainability, this course integrated Global French voices via texts, film, and other cultural artefacts, via work with the local community in order to explore the ways in which cultures around the world—and students themselves—conceive of the connections between land, knowledge and being. We explored how these concepts informed our identities and communities through experiential learning that included community engagement and work with local artists, fromagers, and farmers. Simultaneously, students continued to develop their communication skills in French, reviewing grammar and vocabulary and learning to express themselves and understand others in increasingly complex and abstract ways.

Comparative approaches to Global issues uses interdisciplinary approaches to examine capitalism and neoliberal globalization and their connections to climate change, culture, politics, economics, and social relationships. In answering one of our Big Questions - How can the concepts and approaches from this course help us understand our place in the world and our impact on climate change? – students worked in groups to trace the global impact of a product or policy meant to alleviate climate change, such as the Duke Climate Commitment, cobalt or wind farms, and explore how people, landscapes, oceans, political and economic structure are affected by decision made in the Global North about how to combat environmental crises. Each group worked on a map or other visual medium to show the class the global connections and disconnection formed by attempts to do the right thing.

During this online 3-credit graduate-level course, students (who have successfully passed a physical assessment course) develop the core knowledge, skills, and values essential to provide sensitive, safe, quality care to patients living with obesity across the lifespan. Through experiential learning activities, students explore the influence of multiple determinants from ecological and biopsychosocial perspectives. Clinical decision-making and obesity-targeted treatment modalities are emphasized to optimize patient-family outcomes. Students are to analyze global obesity trends over the past 50 years, highlighting ecological and social determinants of health, such as climate change; generate innovative strategies for obesity prevention and co-management, encompassing both physical and mental health within the context of social determinants of health and a changing planetary landscape; evaluate the effectiveness of promoting healthy, holistic, and climate-friendly lifestyle and treatment interventions; explore the complex interplay between stigma, weight bias, and the patient-provider relationship on health, health equity, and social justice; and finally, implement interprofessional patient-handling methodologies with bariatric equipment to enhance safe, high-quality, and respectful patient care, addressing potential environmental challenges.

In this community-engaged qualitative research course, students conduct quality improvement projects with community partners in the Triangle area. Previously, our community partners have been health, human service and disability-related organizations. This year, we also partnered with organizations focused on sustainable farming and the environment, namely Duke Campus Farm, Keep Durham Beautiful, and North Carolina Wildlife Federation. Students participated in community clean-up activities, hikes, organizational meetings, and farm work. Students interviewed volunteers about what motivates and sustains their efforts and what personal and community changes they have experienced. Through this, students gained a deeper appreciation for the urgency and value of collective, active care for the earth.

The Fellows Climate Sections encompass a longitudinal curriculum integrated into the 3 year longitudinal fellows training curriculum within the Duke Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medical Fellowship training program from Graduate Medical Trainees.  During these dedicated sessions medical trainees explore how climate comes into their daily work, how medicine impacts climate, how they feel about this, and tangible steps they can take in their daily practice to address this for patients and their own practices (actions, research, change making, etc). Specifically for this fellow group they explored how the cyclical impacts of climate events lead to negative effects on lung health and increased health care utilization, driving more negative climate impact via health care energy use, plastic waste, volatile gas discharge, etc.  Further they dedicated time to research idea brain storming, learning about ongoing research at duke and making connections for productive work across the University.