Jamie Browne: When It Doesn't Fit

A Personal Connection to Climate Challenges

At one point when I was growing up, our family car was a Volvo without air conditioning (this was back in the days before A/C was standard in vehicles). When we moved to a hotter state, my parents had after-market air conditioning installed in the car--but, in spite of repeated tweaks, it never ran quite right again. That Volvo was on my mind when I chose a course to re-design for the Climate and Sustainability Teaching Fellows Program (CAST). 

Course Background and Initial Challenges

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I've developed and taught 3 different first-year writing courses at Duke, all based around the concepts of water and ecology. Two explicitly deal with climate change, but the other, focused on freshwater resources and environmental justice, was only climate-adjacent. I chose the latter class to redesign, but it was proving tricky. First-year writing courses at Duke are seminars that combine instruction in both academic writing and a specific discipline; as well, I had revised and refined this course many times over the years. Try as I might, there didn't seem to be any room to add a specific climate change component, since any addition or change would have left scaffolding gaps. 

Student Insights Spark a Shift

But as has so often happened in my teaching, the answer, or at least the beginnings of it, came from the students themselves.  The first clue was in an early assignment: to research and write about the watershed where they lived. I had a series of guiding questions, but many students included something additional--how climate change was already affecting water availability and quality where they lived. And in class discussions about the readings, some students started to ask about specific climate change effects on things such as groundwater availability. 

Creating Space for Climate Conversations

Responding to the students' concerns, I left more openings than usual in class discussions of the readings; and as a class we started to talk about climate implications and make wider connections between the readings and climate-related topics. I realized that, rather than shoehorning in additional readings, I could effectively integrate climate change in an organized fashion throughout the rest of the course. 

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Strategies for Integration

To facilitate the integration, I made sure to give some space and some direction in the class. I joined the students in raising specific considerations relating to climate in class discussions, and made sure we made space for their questions and contributions in class and in asynchronous written discussion posts. This strategy proved quite rewarding, allowing students to bring in their own experience, knowledge, concerns, and questions. Some students tied in topics they'd learned about in other classes, including one taught by another CAST fellow; a few also referenced things they'd learned in the summer reading, All We Can Save. I tied climate explicitly into our work with ecosystems, considering climate impacts as drivers and also looking at climate through the lens of complex systems. As we normalized this inclusion, student groups also included climate into their large class project, a scientific research proposal, even if their topics at first glance seemed only tangentially related.  

Reflections and Future Direction

The end result of these changes was more rewarding than anything I'd imagined at the outset. Rather than trying to force in one or two additional focused topics, I was able, with the input of the students, to add an extra dimension into all the ongoing topics. Going forward, I plan to continue the strategy of interweaving. I envision this happening in two ways: encouraging students to bring in their own questions and experiences while guiding the integration of these, and intentionally introducing climate into the topics from the outset.