Climate Change Education: Student Media Production to Educate and Engage

Climate change education offers many challenges, including the complexity of the natural and human systems involved, a need for a multi-disciplinary perspective, and the psychological barriers to learning that result from a problem that frequently elicits a sense of being overwhelmed and powerless. The implications of climate change impacts and/or solutions can be especially overwhelming for today's students, who are likely to be confronted with many projected changes within their lifetimes. We are developing approaches to incorporate video production by students at both the high school and university levels in order to overcome many of the challenges unique to climate change education. Through media production, students are asked to convey complex topics using clear, simple language and metaphor, so their content knowledge must be deep enough to educate others. Video production is a team effort (director, camera person, editor, etc.) and inherently creates an opportunity for learning in a social context, which has been shown to lead to better learning outcomes in climate change education. Video production also promotes the basic tenets of engagement theory, in which a small group of students is in constant contact with the content and, ideally, creates a product that can be disseminated broadly. Lastly, putting students behind the camera can give them a voice and a sense of empowerment, fostering active participation in the learning process. While video is a medium that is readily disseminated to a broad audience, our focus is on the process (i.e., learning outcomes of students directly involved in media production), not the product. However, we have found that providing students with a means to add their voices to the broader public's discussion of climate change has a positive impact on student engagement with climate change science and on public awareness this problem beyond the classroom. While student-produced media pieces are not intended to provide in-depth scientific information to the broader public, we have found that they can be successful in conveying some of the key, basic concepts needed to understand anthropogenic climate change. Some of these concepts include the causal relationships between fossil fuel-based energy systems, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and climate change; the distinction between natural and anthropogenic processes in the carbon cycle; impacts of climate change on ecosystem services; and transitioning to renewable energy systems that do not emit carbon dioxide is necessary to avert 'dangerous' climate change.