How Can Schools Be Sites of Hope for a Sustainable Future?

A podcast from Teachers College, Columbia University focusing on work in higher education that aims to improve our world.

Pursuing the Public Good is connected to a broader initiative at Teachers College focusing on efforts to tackle crucial challenges in Teacher Education, Mental Health and Wellness, Sustainability, and Digital Innovation.

Learn More about the Public Good Initiative

Thomas Bailey:
Welcome to Pursuing the Public Good, where we talk about how work in universities and higher education can center on making change in the world. This week we're talking about sustainability. We've all heard at this point what an eminently important issue this is, it's literally global, and it can feel like a very big problem, to say the least. And this week's guest is here to help us think about why it's important to center sustainability in education in all spaces and subjects, not just a few weeks in science class or on Earth Day. Oren Pizmony-Levy is Associate Professor of International and Comparative Education and Director of the Center for Sustainable Futures here at Teachers College. His work focuses on the intersection of education and social movements, and he and colleagues lead work on sustainable efforts at Teachers' College. Oren, thank you for being here.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Thank you so much, Tom, for inviting me.

Thomas Bailey:
We know sustainability is a huge problem, not only on its face, the reality and specter of climate change are increasing rates of depression among young people in particular. You and your colleagues are leading a number of projects on sustainability, both here at Teachers College and Beyond. For this conversation, I want to focus on the work you're doing with the Office of Energy and Sustainability at New York City Public Schools. First, why is it important to bring sustainability efforts to K-12 schooling?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Great question. In my teaching, I pose it to my students at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester, and we always have a very interesting debate about the role of K-12 schools when it comes to sustainability. Back in the late '60s, scholars, activists and policymakers agreed that education is the long-term strategy for advancing sustainability. They believe that schools is the place where children learn basic academic knowledge, they develop skills and adopt cultural norms. If we want to foster and engage an empowered citizenry committed to promoting sustainability, it really necessitates that we have a strategic investment in the preparation of the next generation. But this is not the end of the story because there are at least two other reasons why it's important to bring sustainability efforts to K 12 schools.
First, schools function as an integral component of the community. So what kids learn at school diffuses to their parents, families, and communities. So think about recycling or composting behaviors. If kids see it at school and learn about the benefits of this for society, they're likely to bring it to their homes and then advocate that the parents will engage with the same behavior. So through schools, we have an opportunity to have broader impact.
The other reason that it's important to bring sustainability to schools is because schools as organizations have an ecological footprint. They consume resources, water, paper, energy, etc. And they produce waste, pollution, etc. So on the one hand, schools consume resources and we might want to change the way they interact with the environment by changing the type of resources they consume or how much. On the other hand, schools have the potential to actively contribute to sustainability endeavors, for example, harnessing solar energy. Think about the large flat roofs that schools have, it's a great area to put solar panels. Or think about establishing and maintaining community gardens that can provide food and healthy nutrition to the community. So these are a couple of ideas for why it's important to bring sustainability to schools.

Thomas Bailey:
So tell us about the research practice partnership. What is a research practice partnership and why did you decide it would be the best approach?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
So Research Practice Partnerships, so RPPs, as they are known, is a new phenomena from the past, I would say, decade and a half, where we as scholars come to the field recognizing that we know something about the phenomena, but the people on the ground, the practitioner, they have also a type of knowledge that we need to appreciate, respect and engage with. When I arrived to Teachers College in 2013 and I was developing my own classes on sustainability, I immediately looked for ways to partner with schools or with the DOE as a way that my students can see what's going on in their backyard in New York City, but also I was looking for a way that we can give back to the community by using our expertise, research, theory, etc.
One of my students back then introduced me to the head of the Office of Sustainability and that person, Sharon Jay, was very nice and came to speak with our students. And from that dialogue, we started playing with ideas on what would it take for her to share with us data that we can analyze for her so she can better understand the needs of the schools. And from this little interaction, that's how the relationship started. And only later on we were able to call it an RPP when we decided that we are going to do it for the long term and we decided on what will be the benefit for them and for us. And this partnership has been going on for eight years already.
Let me share with you two highlights of this partnership. One was hosting a panel together with my colleagues from the city at the Comparative International Education Society Conference in San Francisco in 2019. I remember senior colleagues telling us in front of everybody how excited they are to see this partnership between practitioners and scholars.
The second moment where I felt really proud and excited is when we co-wrote a paper together. I sat together with my colleagues, we looked at our partnership, and we assessed together the ways in which the office, their team used the research that we are producing here in order to inform and improve their practice. The paper was recently published in top tier journal, Environmental Education Research. I learned a lot from the practice of working with them on this paper. It's fun to be part of a team that is focused on improving schools and solving problems using social science research.

Thomas Bailey:
That sounds great, so can you tell us more specifically what you are doing with the schools?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
We focus our attention working with the Office of Energy and Sustainability at the New York City Public School. This office is responsible for implementing the policy around sustainability education in the city. We are there to support them through a couple of activities. One, we have a research program with them. We help them to build this research program, we helped them to develop the instrument. What kind of questions to ask educators in order to better support these educators later on, or we conducted focus groups or interviews in order to understand what do educators on the ground experience when they are tasked with implementing or promoting sustainability in school. So we do a lot of research with the office. We then use this research to identify good practices and also to identify gaps in the system. And we use good practices, we try to disseminate them through conferences, professional development events, webinars, et cetera.
And when we document a gap or some patterns of inequality between schools serving high resource communities or low resource communities, we are trying to work with the partners at the New York City Public School in order to develop policies that can mitigate these inequalities. And later on we are going to talk about one of these moments when we did research with the office, we identify the gaps in climate change education specifically, and then we developed professional development for teachers on the subject of change in climate education. However, I must mention that our colleagues and students at Teachers College are engaged in many other projects to advance sustainability in K-12 schools. This includes very creative research on mental health and environmental degradation or research on youth climate activists and even research into public opinion on different policies and practices. This work is really important when we want to empower teachers on the ground who are trying to promote and advance this work at schools.

Thomas Bailey:
Give us a sense of a curriculum on sustainability and climate change. How would you implement that? What would the content of that be? Would it be special modules or would you somehow integrate it into everything? If we'd like to see this in schools throughout the country, what would it look like?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Whether we want to create a new subject called sustainability or climate change or environmental education versus infusing it to the curriculum, there has been a debate about this for many, many decades. My philosophy is that it's better to try and integrate and infuse it throughout the different subjects so it'll get more exposure to students. And we'll also think about this topic from a multi or interdisciplinary perspective. So at the elementary school, let's take for example, climate change. Many people think about climate change as a topic for the science teacher, but it's not only for the science teacher.
It's not only about the facts of what caused climate change or what will be the consequences, we also want to help students digest and think and reflect about climate change through the English language arts curriculum, for example, by reading books about other kids who are taking action. So think about Greta Thunberg from Sweden. There are at least three, four books that I know about that can help students to think about what they can do in their community, so you can bring the content to ELA classes. You can use math education to practice reading charts, for example. That's the standards for fourth and fifth grade in the US, and you can use that in order to teach how to read charts. But the content could be about climate change or strategies to adapt or mitigate to climate change.
In later ages you can bring climate change in geography. You can bring it in social studies by talking about activism, political engagement, advocacy. How do you write a letter that has an argument and is trying to convince city council members to take action? Or in history, you can infuse the discussion about climate change when you talk about the industrial revolution. Imagine the industrial revolution that would happen not based on fossil fuels, but based on solar energy. We won't be in the same situation we are here today. You can do a lot of creative thinking and we can envision with kids different pasts futures and what it will mean for our current crisis. We've been thinking about this with teachers for a long time, and every time we do research with teachers and we ask them, "How do you teach about climate change?" We always get new responses on the creative ways they infuse climate change into the curriculum, including in physical education, in arts, across different age groups and grades. It's really interesting to see how teachers are playing with this idea.

Thomas Bailey:
So I know that you have professional development workshops in the summer with public school teachers. Tell us a little about what you do in those and what a teacher comes out with after going through those workshops.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
So you are referring to the summer institutes we started this year in 2023. And before I say anything about what we do, I want to say something about who we partner with because it's really important. First, this is a co-production with the Office of Energy and Sustainability. It's a vision that we developed together based on the research we've done over the past four years where we asked teachers in the city whether they teach about climate and if they don't teach, why not? And then we learned about the gaps. There is gap in knowledge. They don't feel that they have enough knowledge about this, or there is a gap in how much they feel comfortable answering questions, or there is a gap in terms of access to materials, lesson plans. And once we identified these gaps, we had an opportunity working with colleagues at Columbia as part of their grant to advance the study of climate change with machine learning and data science. And they were looking to have broad impact.
So through this grant with money from the National Science Foundation, we developed this summer institute. We wanted to bring to this summer institute the unique perspective that Teachers College brings to the topic. We have fantastic science educators that knows how to teach the science of climate change, but we also have great colleagues that know a lot about the anxiety that climate change brings to adults and to kids and how you deal with it, and that's part of the psychology unit at the college.
So for this summer institute, we try to bring together all of this expertise at the college, the math, the science, social studies, English, language arts with expertise from comparative and international education, my own field, together with the science of climate, with colleagues from Columbia and research about climate racism that is happening at Columbia as well and we created a professional learning opportunity for teachers where we tried to give them the basic working knowledge about climate, not only that it's happening, not only that it's getting warmer, but also how do we know what we know? What is the science behind it, what are the gaps? What kind of questions we still have that could inspire kids to pursue a career in this later on. We brought experts from the domains within the college, psychology, health, education, in order to show teachers how to unpack this knowledge about climate science and bring it to the different subjects of the curriculum.
And the last part of the summer institute was developing a small community of teachers in elementary schools that can work together on producing new lesson plans and units on climate change that are relevant to New York City. And the idea is that they're going to present it soon in a mini conference we're going to have at the college and then after we'll work a little bit on refining these lesson plans, we are going to make them available to all teachers in New York City and the country.

Thomas Bailey:
So you've really answered the next question I'm going to ask, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Climate change is a huge area. Our own university here has a whole school devoted to it. I think most universities now have a climate change school. So we have our 150 faculty, how is it that we in this crowded field can make a unique contribution as Teachers College? What are we adding that's not already there 10 times bigger than we are?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Our added value here is not in advancing the science of sustainability or the science of climate change; that's why we have great partners at Columbia or other schools. We have a unique expertise on how to bring change to schools, how to transform the curriculum, how to translate ideas from the science to different subject matter. We know how to work with leaders, principals, different people with leadership at the district level, et cetera. We have the expertise on the policy of the leadership, psychology, health, education, and I believe that's our added value. We know how to translate the knowledge that scientists are producing on sustainability and climate and then to empower people on the ground to take action around it through schools. And for that, we have to be an expert on the schooling. Many of our colleagues at Columbia, Stanford, Harvard are doing research and then some projects with schools. We have the expertise on how to get it done in schools and how to work with communities to really make a change, and I think that's our unique added value.

Thomas Bailey:
You've talked about the anxiety around this, and I have a 2-year-old granddaughter. She's going to be 78 in the year 2100. And I think about, what kind of a world we will have. And of course at this point she's too young to be anxious about that. I have some teenage grandchildren and they're much more concerned. So what is it that we can do, and particularly what Teachers College can do to think about the anxiety and the mental health issues that this problem is causing and will actually exacerbate.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
I am a sociologist, I'm not a psychologist, but I benefit a lot from speaking with my colleagues who are psychologists at the college by understanding, how do you address anxiety? One of the ways to address it is by engaging with action. When kids go to school with this anxiety and they see teachers avoiding the topic or just mentioning it and moving on, or just talking about the cause and consequence of climate and don't get further into the action, that's something I want to change.
So if we want to address anxiety, we need to empower teachers to think about the type of actions that their school, their community can engage in order to show kids that we are working on a solution, we are part of a solution. The other thing that kids want to know is that there is hope. So when we run our Summer Institute or any other professional development, we always emphasize that we are making progress. There is uptake in the production of energy from renewable sources. More governments are making commitments. Yes, we can and should do more, but we always try to highlight the hope in this story because without hope people will be cynical or there will be no motivation, and that's not what we want to have in schools. We want kids to see that we are doing something, that the education sector is active on this.

Thomas Bailey:
So you've done a lot and I wonder what have you seen so far resulting from the efforts that you have done so much for?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
So I'll zoom back for a second from the concrete example of climate education to broader sustainability. And I believe that over the past eight years, we are seeing that more and more schools in New York City are engaging with the topic of sustainability education. Through the survey that we are doing with the Office of Energy and Sustainability, we see more schools reporting on activities in terms of the facilities of the school, reducing energy consumption, adopting solar panels, et cetera. But we also see more educational activities.
One of the most promising practice that we see growing is schools creating green teams, small clubs where kids can come and work together with adults on making a meaningful change in the school culture around sustainability. And we see a jump in the number of schools that are having it. If I'm not wrong, the last figure I saw was around 52% of public schools in New York City are saying that they have an active green club. I think we have a lot to study about this green club, what's going on there, what kind of learning is happening there, but I'm very encouraged and hopeful by the growth of this practice.
We also see more policies and more action by the New York City Public School around this. So just recently we saw Mayor Adams requiring every public school to hold an action day around climate. Think about that, the mayor is telling the schools that they have to engage not only in the teaching about climate, but in actual action days. He wants to see something happening, something getting done. And I believe that this is partly because of the work that we have been doing with our partners in New York City public schools around this. In the coming years, I hope that we are going to see smaller gaps between schools that serve a more resourceful population and other groups. I hope that we will see more equity in the system.
Since we started this work, we are getting a lot of calls from teachers who heard about what we are doing, they're seeking our guest lectures sometimes. They want us to come and speak with the principal. They want us to do a small project with them. And we have many master's students at the college that are doing the final paper on sustainability, using the data that we collected with New York City public schools. We see ripple effects that we are not only working directly with the schools, but we are also training or educating the next generation of educators, psychologists, health professionals that are minded to sustainability, that have that lens in their work.
We have other measures of success. I'll mention one more. The work that we are doing in New York got the attention of colleagues at the OECD, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and TC, the Center for Sustainable Futures was invited to contribute to the new International Survey on Teaching and Learning, where they're going to survey teachers in 54 countries in order to understand what they do around sustainability and climate education, and this research is based on the work that we've been doing here for years in New York City.

Thomas Bailey:
So another indication of the attention that you have received is that just a couple of weeks ago there was a New York Times article, we were all very proud of the mention of your work, of our center as well. That certainly gave me hope for a wider adaptation. I guess, do you see this as an indication of going to scale? I think we often can get discouraged thinking about climate change. It's nice that we attract that attention, but where can we find optimism? How are you thinking about how we're moving forward?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
I'm very optimistic about this, and I can't stop thinking about the conversation that we are having now. Under your leadership, TC is making sustainability one of the main pillars or initiatives for the college. For me as a faculty member, that's a great point of hope that with advocacy from students and from faculty, we were able to convince our own institution that it's important, and I think this is happening in many other settings. It's happening in New York. It just happened in New Jersey a couple of years ago, there is a mandate to have climate change education in every school at every grade. While I have my own questions about whether this is the way to go, I see the institutionalization of climate education and sustainability education as a great point of hope.
Research that our doctoral student, Carine Verschueren, did a couple of years ago showed that more than 1/3 of the 200 largest school districts in the country have a whole-school approach on sustainability education. So it's growing. More and more cities are adopting it. We have been doing research on 54 global cities, and we are seeing some similar patterns there as well. So I'm very hopeful. I see the international discussion around education getting more and more intense on sustainability education. And as I mentioned earlier, even the OECD, an organization that is considered to be more conservative on these issues, even though OECD is infusing sustainability and climate change into the different policy instruments. It has a survey of teachers and a survey of students to really encourage governments to take action on this matter. What gives me hope is that I'm seeing growing numbers of parents, kids, colleagues, students, leaders all coming together and working together on advancing sustainability in society and in schools.

Thomas Bailey:
What can people do if that you've convinced them that we need to center sustainability across our students' educational experience and spaces? And also how can we as Teachers College help promote this and move it forward?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
If our listeners are parents to school-age kids and we convinced them that it's important, say something to the teachers. Express your support that this is an important topic. Many teachers avoid dealing with climate change specifically because they're afraid of the pushback from the community, especially in more conservative states or conservative communities. So if you're a parent that is listening, say something to the teacher of your kids. Encourage them to engage, offer to help. If you are a teacher or an educator, think about how climate change is going to affect your discipline or how your discipline can enrich public understanding and engagement with climate change or sustainability.
Earlier I mentioned different subjects. Every teacher, every subject has something to do with climate. At the college specifically, I would like to see more colleagues engaging with sustainability and climate in the classes. Not everybody will offer a special class on the topic, but everybody can find a way to infuse the topic to their classes, from Econ of education to a class on community colleges, everybody has something to offer on the matter of sustainability and climate. It's starting from assigning a reading, a podcast, having an activity, or just thinking about what taken for granted assumptions we have about the world in terms of the environment that our field of practice is enjoying.
For example, schools and education assumes that the planet, the ecosystem is working perfectly, but if climate change, it will continue as we expect it to happen, we're going to suffer from more severe weather events, etc., all of this is going to challenge the way we provide education. So everybody has something to ask or to do around this topic in this subject matter. If you are an adult or professional outside of education, I'm sure there are ways that you can engage with this. I know many professional associations from nursing to psychology to nutrition, everybody is now minded to the issue of sustainability and climate and there are special interest groups or sections that are focusing on this. Try to find them and see what you can learn and what kind of ideas you can take from them or bring to them in order to promote this work of sustainability in your own organization.

Thomas Bailey:
So Oren, thank you so much for participating in this. I must say I've learned so much from you and from others in this series of podcasts that I'm so impressed and really proud of the work that we're doing at Teachers College to try to address these really difficult problems and to use our unique combination of health, education, and psychology to take a comprehensive approach. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Thank you, Tom, for inviting me, and thank you for putting such a spotlight on this important topic. I appreciate that.

Thomas Bailey:
Pursuing the Public Good is produced by the Office of the President, the Digital Futures Institute and Office of Institutional Advancement at Teachers College Columbia University. Take a look at our show notes for links to learn more about the work of our guests and the Public Good Initiative at Teachers College, access transcripts, and see our full credits for this episode.