Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Yale-NUS associate professor of social sciences and humanities, we have to lead students to express correct emotional responses to climate change issues, rather than just presenting them with facts and letting them draw their own conclusions.
To Teach Students about Climate Change, ‘Just the Facts’ Isn’t Enough
We also need to talk about emotions and discuss pathways to action
By Matthew Schneider-Mayerson on September 28, 2021
After the latest gut-wrenching Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, with the United Nations Climate Change Conference ahead, and with the school year in full swing, a question arises: How should we be teaching young people about climate change?
…
I’ve taught about climate change for over a decade, and I’ve found that two critical elements are frequently overlooked as we teach students about the warming world. Failing to include them in the classroom not only leads to an impoverished understanding of the subject, but inhibits our collective ability to respond. These elements apply to teaching outside the classroom, too—whether it’s practiced by parents, grandparents, siblings or mentors.
The first is emotion. How should students feel about climate change? Emotion norms guide us on how to feel about different issues, but these norms tend to prioritize certain topics (such as intimate relationships) and ignore others (such as collective or global challenges). Some of my students enter my classroom having experienced significant climate anxiety. For others, I have the heavy responsibility of opening their eyes to some deeply troubling realities. At that point I may be the person in their lives who knows and cares the most (publicly) about climate change. As such, they unconsciously take cues from me about how one might feel about the subject, just as they take cues from their friends, public figures and people they encounter on social media and in films, TV shows and literature.
Should they respond to the climate crisis with a sense of objectivity and disinterest? That is what most teachers are trained and frequently incentivized to demonstrate: just the facts, please. Should they feel despair and hopelessness? Many students leave classes that discuss environmental issues in such a state. Should they feel blindly optimistic, despite the avalanche of bad news? It’s painful to see my students suffer, so there’s a temptation to end my classes by saying, “With the right policies and innovation, everything will be fine,” even if it’s not true.
Or should students acknowledge, feel, discuss and process their emotions—emotions that attest to their underlying care, concern and connection to the natural world? Should they use these feelings, hard as they are, as fuel to take meaningful action? This is what I now try to encourage and model for students. It begins by admitting to myself that teaching is, among other things, an affective demonstration, and that my students are carefully (if unconsciously) attuned to my performance.
That puts an additional burden on teachers. Not only must we stay up to date with a subject that is constantly developing and craft classes that are both educational and engaging during a pandemic, but we also have a duty to demonstrate an emotional orientation towards climate change. That’s hard; perhaps it’s unfair. So is climate change. It’s time we acknowledge that emotion is a critical aspect of learning about and responding to it.
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Read more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-teach-students-about-climate-change-lsquo-just-the-facts-rsquo-isn-rsquo-t-enough/
Yale-NUS claims their mission is “… As a community, we aim to provide every member with a transformative experience by encouraging habits of the mind (such as creativity, curiosity and critical thinking) and character (integrity, professionalism and ethic of service). Central to the transformation process is our engagement with diverse modes of enquiry and a commitment to challenge our assumptions. …”.
I’m curious about how the rigidly proscriptive teaching style Professor Schneider-Mayerson describes teaches students creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, and helps students acquire the self confidence to challenge assumptions.
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Yeah, that’s the way we should deal with reality and the real world, emotionally. How could that ever go wrong?
He’s an idiot and working at a preschool level, thinking that the world is all about our emotions. Growing up is learning that many of the things you fantasized about as a child are simply not possible in the real world.
Give him a lollypop and send him home, forever.
He teaches? That’s not teaching, that’s brainwashing while disarming students from thinking responsibly and logically about real world factors that affect their lives.
A Professor who feels that emotional content is a critical part of a discussion about a scientific subject is not teaching science. He is demonstrating his skills in propaganda. Science doesn’t need emotion, it needs evidence. Emotion is the condiment of fact-free belief. Emotional thinking led to “witch” killings, eugenics, the Holocaust, Lysenkoism and the many millions starved to death by the “great leap forward” in China. Professors like this are the ones the socialist dictatorships should have sent out to the farms for reeducation.
Honestly, it sounds like his approach to dealing with the complexities of life is to just act like a two year old.
Once one accepts that indoctrination and education are the same thing, there is no longer a problem.
The word ‘CORRECT’ here says it all. This is nothing less than propaganda served up to a vulnerable captive audience.
This has been an endemic problem in the educational establishments for some years, where students are told WHAT to think and not HOW to think, based on facts presented free of manipulation.
The result is that we now see people who should know better, with letters after their names in the top echelons of society spouting a great deal of emotional nonsense, leading to some ghastly decisions.
But then all the students keep on using fossil fuels every day, just as if they had no such teaching! So what good is the teaching if they do not sacrifice luxuries for the cause?
When I saw “Yale-NUS” I was under the impression that it was part of a well known university located in New Haven. It’s actually in Singapore.
The article sounds more like indoctrination than education.
Of course, it may not be much different in New Haven these days.
Wow.
Yale-NUS associate professor of social sciences and humanities.
Time to bring out the big guns, is it?
Next we’ll be confronted by someone who can fart and chew gum, simultaneously!
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters:
http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium-large/the-sleep-of-reason-produces-monsters-goya.jpg
Goya: ‘without reason, evil and corruption prevail’.
So, not at all pleased that some of his students have climate anxiety, his purpose is to ensure that all of them have the same phobias.
The man should be locked up on abuse charges.
“… As a community, we aim to provide every member with a transformative experience by encouraging habits of the mind (such as creativity, curiosity and critical thinking) and character (integrity, professionalism and ethic of service). Central to the transformation process is our engagement with diverse modes of enquiry and a commitment to challenge our assumptions. …”
Oh f*** off.
OK. So he wants to teach “Political-Climate-Science” rather than real, actual science about the climate. What else is new?
(Or maybe he’s looking for a job with “The Storm Channel”.)
Yale-NUTS Professor ….;)
The best advice I can give Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Yale-NUS associate professor, has already been stated simply and eloquently:
“Never go full retard, man!”
An expert in anti-social sciences and inhumanities, that’s what is deeply troubling.
Hey, Prof, that’s called indoctrination.
Emotional black mailer! Logic, not so much!
And what will these students do after they graduate, and no longer have their professor(s) nearby to hold their hands and tell them what to do, if they haven’t learned to think for themselves? This assistant professor clearly isn’t the brightest bulb on the tree!
You’d think they could at least present a framework with key components like: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of Climate Change.
Members of the church of Climate Scientism definitely have a certain look about them don’t they?
“associate professor of social sciences and humanities” Well that pretty much says it all.
Yale-NUS College is a liberal arts college in Singapore. Established in 2011 as a collaboration between Yale University and the National University of Singapore
So how does he deal with mass hysteria?
If I had that guys face back at me in the mirror each morning I’d also have mommy problems. Never truly gave up the bottle. Years of Strict Freudian Therapy is the only hope.
First it was teaching what to think, now he wants to teach how to feel. Instead of teaching facts and critical thinking, he wants everybody to be weepy helpless gits.