Bringing Sustainability Into Every School Subject

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Thomas Bailey:
Welcome to Pursuing the Public Good. I'm Tom Bailey, president of Teachers College.
Teachers College works at the intersection of education, health, and psychology to understand not just how people learn, but how we can help build a more just and sustainable world. Our public good initiative is the embodiment of that mission. It brings together TC faculty, students, and community partners to tackle our most pressing societal challenges today. This episode is about one of those challenges. Climate change is already reshaping where and how children learn. It's closing schools during heat waves, displacing families after floods, and generating a level of anxiety in young people that we're only beginning to understand. And yet, in too many classrooms, it remains an afterthought. Perhaps it's a unit in science class, if it's covered at all. We know that's not enough. The next generation will inherit this crisis and they need the knowledge, skills, and the agency to face it head on.
Here in New York City, we are at the center of this conversation. Teachers College is the first graduate school of education to offer a master's degree in sustainability and education, because we believe that preparing educators to address this crisis is a core responsibility of what it means to train the next generation of educators and leaders.
In the conversation you're about to hear, journalist Caroline Preston of the Hechinger Report, whose newsletter covers how climate change is reshaping education, sits down with Oren Pizmony-Levy, associate professor of international and comparative education and director of the Center for Sustainable Futures here at Teachers College. Oren and his colleagues have been working directly with New York City public schools to build the capacity of teachers to bring climate education into their classrooms. They're joined by two teachers who have done exactly that. Ericka Blake is a special education teacher at the Women's Academy of Excellence in the Bronx, who found a way to make climate education come alive for students through research, writing and advocacy. And Judith Felice teaches math at the George J. Ryan Middle School in Queens, where she's used everything from farming economics to NASA data sets to bring sustainability into her algebra and statistics classes. Together, they explore what climate education actually looks like when it works, why teacher buy-in matters, and how giving students a sense of agency around this issue might be one of the most important things a school can do.

Caroline Preston:
Thanks everyone for joining us on season two of Pursuing the Public Good. I'm Caroline Preston. I'm managing editor of the Hechinger Report. We're a nonprofit newsroom covering education. And I also write a newsletter for Hechinger about how climate change is reshaping education. I know our guests are seeing many of these issues firsthand and looking for solutions, so I'm really excited about this conversation. I'm joined by Oren Pizmony-Levy.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Hi everybody.

Caroline Preston:
I'm also joined by Ericka Blake, a law school graduate who now works as a special education teacher at the Women's Academy of Excellence in the Bronx.

Ericka Blake:
Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Caroline Preston:
And we also have Judith Felice, a math teacher at the George J. Ryan Middle School in Queens, New York.

Judith Felice:
Thank you so much for having me.

Caroline Preston:
Oren, can you start first of all by defining sustainability for us? And then tell us about the Center for Sustainable Futures and what drives your work connecting climate change and environmental sustainability to education.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Okay. So thank you for the question about sustainability. I think there are many different ways that people define sustainability or sustainable development. I think it will be useful for us to start with the most common or most quoted definition that comes from a report that came out in the '80s. It's called Our Common Future. And there, the authors define sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. So to be sustainable, it means that we need to balance three pillars. We need to balance environmental protection and social wellbeing and also economic growth. And it's getting tricky because some people have different conceptions of how these three pillars relate to each other.
But if we want to take sustainability one step further, sustainability today, I would say, is the governing logic behind a lot of the global cooperation agreements. So if we think about Agenda 2030, Agenda for Sustainable Development, it has 17 different sustainability development goals. One of them is being education. We'll talk more about the role of education in it, but it's a really complicated web of goals and targets that are aimed to bring us to a better place in the future.

Caroline Preston:
And tell us about the center and what drives your work connecting environmental issues and climate change to education.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Okay. So the Center for Sustainable Futures, no offense to anyone else, but I would say that that's one of my favorite parts of being a professor at Teachers College. It's a community that we created together. It brings together faculty and students and staff from across the college with, I would say, one shared goal, and it is to advance sustainability in society. And society could be Teachers College. So we are trying to improve the way we do research here and the way we teach about the topic, even the way we are just being in this institution, in the light fixtures, the heating, the cooling.
And then we're also seeking to advance it in New York City. And that's part of our research practice partnership with the DOE or with other entities in the government in the U.S. or in other countries. So it's really a wonderful community that brings together people.

Caroline Preston:
So Ericka and Judith, what first inspired you to want to bring issues of climate change and environmental sustainability into your classrooms with your students? Were they coming to you with awareness and questions about these issues and concerns? Was it your own outside motivation, what you were reading? What was the impetus here? And Judith, do you want to start?

Judith Felice:
Sure. I think that the sadness that overwhelms me when I see images of what our earth is suffering through is really the motivation that I personally had. I am very fortunate to be in a school where our children are educated in multiple aspects of climate education already. So my eighth graders are very fortunate to have already been exposed to what climate change, climate impact, and what can be done, maybe not so much on a deep level, but on a level where they know they should turn the lights off at least. So my own desire to be a positive influence and my students coming to me with a good foundation is actually a recipe for success.

Caroline Preston:
And Ericka, what about you?

Ericka Blake:
Well, it would be the opposite, I would say. Students were not coming to me necessarily interested in climate change. My personal, I guess it would be similar to what Judith was saying personally, it is an interest of mine. I'm a special education teacher, but I push into the history and the English classes. And I try to extend my passions towards my students just to make them more aware of the world around them. And that's the biggest thing in the classroom that I try to implement is, "Hey, pay attention to what's going on with you." Understand that different events that are happening in the world does have an effect on you. You have an effect on that. So what catalyst could I use to really draw the students in to have them interested in the world around them? And in that effort, I found out that some students are interested and are paying attention to climate change and what's around them.

Caroline Preston:
Oren, go ahead.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
I relate to both motivations to do this kind of work. And when I was thinking about your question, I think first for me was my upbringing. So I grew up in a Latin Israel on the Red Sea and witnessed firsthand how the negative impact of development, the tourism industry really affected the beautiful fragile coral reef we had there. So for me, that was the first seed, I would say, that started this motivation to think about sustainability as part of my life mission. Then I think becoming a parent and realizing that my two kids are going to grow up in a planet that is qualitative different than the planet I grew up on and my mother and my brother grew up on. And it's not that we are aliens. We're not coming from different planet. It's just a different planet that is more unstable in terms of the climate patterns and heat waves and other natural disasters.
And then as a sociologist that is used to look at education and how education over the past 200 years had such a big impact on individuals and societies, I can't stop thinking about how much education can be a tool for us to really solve this problem of sustainability and to move forward into a better, greener, sustainable future.

Caroline Preston:
Yeah. I think a lot of us, as people reading the news, walking around or searching for ways to make a little bit of a difference on this issue that is so giant and your work with students provides one opportunity. So I want to get into some of the specific ways that you're doing that.
But Oren, first I want to ask you, there's often a perception that climate change is a science topic. Maybe it should be taught in science class. Maybe teachers who are literature teachers don't know much about it. But there's also been a push in recent years to teach it across more subjects. For example, New Jersey has legislation to teach it in most subjects, even PE and arts. Some teachers are teaching it and New York is following suit. What do you think about that approach? Why do you think it belongs in many different disciplines of instruction?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
So climate change education mandates, as you just mentioned in New Jersey and New York, are becoming really popular. We see other local authorities in the U.S. and abroad looking to adopt them. We see that the public has appetite for them. Around 80% of Americans in our last research that we've done support these mandates. And not only that, same number, 80% support requiring every teacher to be trained in teaching about climate. So the public is really there. Our research in New York shows that teachers are into this as well. They're feeling comfortable if they will be required to teach it. And some of them really want to see the city or the state adopting these mandates.
But I'm a little bit less enthusiastic. I'm less enthusiastic because unless mandates come with a robust investment in teachers in terms of their education and professional development, this mandate will be nothing at the end. It will be just a source of frustration for everybody. And people will feel like it's being added on them. So I would suggest, if someone would ask me, I would suggest how about we start with building the capacity, educate the teachers, train the teachers, provide them with resources and professional development, create the buy-in for this kind of reorientation of the system, and then add the mandate to make sure that really everybody has it, and it's on the books and it's institutionalized. But I'm not sure I'm all for mandating first without investing in the teachers. Teachers are overwhelmed. We know that there is a lot of burnout. We know that they feel like that we are adding more and more to their plate. Climate is just one item on their plate, so I think we need to rethink the way we engage them in order to create a successful implementation at the end.

Ericka Blake:
I agree.

Caroline Preston:
Judith and Ericka, what are your thoughts on that?

Ericka Blake:
Definitely agree with the buy-in. That's important. As a parent first, I homeschooled my children for a number of years before beginning teaching. And I was an active parent and learned not only with teacher buy-in, but the parents and the families getting the buy-in there, when you have that together, things start to happen. And then if mandates do come in at that point, it's already happened already. You already have the minds ready and feeling like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, this is a part of what we've been doing all along."
So where I am now, mandates, no. As a teacher, I don't want to hear anymore about mandates and "You have to do this and have to do that," and still making sure the student passes the regions. "Do we have to add this to the curriculum? How are we going to do that?" So part of my interest with the institute for me was that, "I'm interested in this" and "How do we get this into the curriculum?" So again, when you have the families involved, when you peak an interest and provide programs and provide opportunities for people to become involved in, that first brings in the buy-in and then the mandates come later.

Judith Felice:
Totally agree, Ericka. I think that when administration puts out, "This is the new curriculum we're going to use" and there's no professional development behind it, regardless how effective that curriculum can be or could be, there is a sense of, "No, I don't want to do it."
And I think that the mandate is already there, Oren, so we can't take it away. We can't take it back. So because the mandate is already there, I think moving forward, starting small and building with a sense of accountability that everyone is engaged in a common goal. One of the aspects of our society is that not everyone believes that there is a problem with our climate. And that is a personal belief. So having an educator teach something that they don't necessarily believe in is a tough task.

Caroline Preston:
I want to come back to some of that resistance, but I want to ask first, you're a special education teacher, you're a math teacher, you're not environmental science teachers, but you are instructing about climate change and educating your students about that. So tell us what that looks like in the classroom for you both.

Ericka Blake:
I teach integrated co-teaching class. So it's a general education class where you have a gen ed teacher and a special education teacher there. So I push into the history class and the English class. So of course, initially I'm thinking history class, how can I get this in the history class? We talk about the industrial revolution. And then I remember for the English class that for the seniors, they have to do a research paper. So during the middle of the, I think at lunchtime, I called my co-teacher and I said, "How about for the research paper this year we do it on climate change?" She was like, "I'm open." She said, "But I'm changing it around. We're going to do a group research in the fall and then the individual students will do their individual one research paper in the spring." So I said, "Okay, great."
So in the fall, we divided them in groups. Each group, we gave a topic on climate change and we started with sustainable development, climate change and crop variation, mental health effects on climate change, corn usage and its effect on climate change and environmental justice. So in doing the research, students began to get very interested in it because they could see how it affects them. They could relate to it. Because especially what I've learned over the years in teaching is that if students can't relate to it and connect to it, it's not important to them, so they really don't take an interest.
So for the spring, I said, "Okay, we heard about climate change, what it is. Let's focus on climate action." So then for the spring, for the individual research papers, they had to choose topics on climate action. So a few of those were carbon pricing, meat production and how to change that. Something I had never heard of was CCS, carbon capture and storage, which was new to me, and that was interesting. Climate justice and equity, cities and infrastructure. And then just the misinformation of climate change, which you mentioned in terms of people feeling, "Is there really climate change?" So they had to do PowerPoint presentations in the end. I learned from them and I can see in their eyes the spark that I wanted to see, in a sense, that they were really interested in it. And when they go to college, they will possibly continue to look into and discuss and study about climate change. And the great thing, the ending part was that next year, the entire English department for our PBL, our big project, the whole English department is going to do it on climate change.

Caroline Preston:
Oh, wow. So a lot of impact for your department and school.

Ericka Blake:
Yes, yes, yes.

Caroline Preston:
And it sounds like the students learned a variety of skills from research and writing, presentation, familiarity with some of those science and policy concepts.
Judith, what about you in terms of your math classes?

Judith Felice:
So being an educator doesn't necessarily mean has to go through any particular subject. I teach my students every single day so many other things than math. Be empathetic, be respectful, be aware of your surroundings. I believe that we can incorporate any particular goal in education. All it is is about exposure, although I feel more comfortable now going through, for example, Orange Institute over the summer and other programs that I've attended. I started small incorporating pictures in my presentations. For example, we work on finding distance from one point A to point B. So I put images of a polar bear on a very small ice sheet, and that really created a stir in the kids.
So images themselves, very simple, a very quick add-on, no major workload issue for the teachers. I started very small and I've worked myself up into incorporating other more deep projects really. I did a project with my eighth graders about farming vegetables in New York City. And I assigned asparagus, I assigned Brussels sprouts, I assigned okra. And I had them research about the cost a farmer would have to incur, how much they can sell, and then how has climate change impacted that particular crop.
So what was interesting is that these particular students, I used my ENL class for that, most of these students do not speak English. So it was wonderful that they were able to utilize their prior knowledge from their own countries and say, "Well, we hardly have any water, and irrigation is a problem." So I said, "Okay, so how do you think climate change is really happening here based on that?"
I also worked with my other two classes this year. They are engaged in Algebra 1 and we have a whole unit on descriptive statistics. So the statistics is the best unit to incorporate this because this whole idea of data. I assigned them one of the NASA websites, pick a topic, something that resonates with you, and we're going to use all of the tools that we learned. It was a great way to incorporate their knowledge, but then also they learned quite a bit. Then I had them think about how they can present their acquired knowledge with those around them. So they created a movie about climate change so that they can present to our sixth graders. And that was really successful. They were able to demonstrate in a fun way this very serious topic. And then I had one of my all girl group, they presented to our PTA. It was very rewarding to see the students take the post quiz, if you want to call it. And I'm going to say the majority felt much more confident that they can engage in climate action.
So I was very excited about the entire project. It was a lot of work, but it was work that for me was well worth the effort. Our school recognized the importance of the subject and it was quite a success.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
I think from the two stories we are hearing here, that's exactly the transformation we would like to see in the education system. And it's connected to a couple of things we talked earlier, but one is that the main barrier that prevent teachers from doing this kind of work is the misconception that, "If I'm not a science teacher, I have nothing to offer." And here in our conversation today, we have two teachers that are not science teachers and they're engaging with the topic in so many levels, so many domains, so many competencies that your students are developing throughout this. This is amazing. This is wonderful. So first, congrats. This is wonderful to see and to hear.
But another issue here is that when we do research with teachers and we ask them about their motivation to do this kind of work, the moment it's coming top down from the superintendent, their motivation is not changing. But once we said to them that the students are interested or asking for this, motivation is up in a significant way. We do a lot of work in our center to try to understand what's going on, and it's exactly what the stories we heard here today that when students are asking for this, teachers are interpreting this as, "The students are showing interest. Of course I have to do this. This is my professional role as an educator. The students are expressing voice. We'd love to see this more. So we have to be attentive and responsive to this." So going back to your question earlier about mandates, I think the examples we are hearing here today is that maybe mandates, yes, they're here and it's okay and we move on, but maybe that's not the only way to create change and transformation in the system.
Now going back to another question you asked me earlier about why to teach it across the different subjects. So one of the reasons is that climate change is not a scientific issue only. It's a social, ethical issue. It's a technological issue. So we need to have the next generation with multiple way of knowings around climate.
Now, some students love science. Some students don't. They like ELA, they like PE, they like the outs. So if we infuse climate education throughout the different subjects, there are multiple entry points for people to access this and to participate as kids from a young age. They also see another aspect of this, is that the kids see all of a sudden that climate doesn't sit in the responsibility of the scientists. Everybody has something to offer about this. And students are observing, taking it in and then acting on it as we just heard from the two cases.
I love the fact that you're able to help the students translate their knowledge into action. This is education as we always talk about it in these classes here at Teachers College. Back to Dewey and until today, this is what we want. We want kids to translate the knowledge in math to activity and we want them to care about the environment and to be empathetic. I would love to sit in these classes.

Caroline Preston:
I also wanted to pick up on how Judith and Ericka both talked about teaching climate action. So not just the problem, but solutions, taking action on that. Oren, tell us a little bit more about why that approach is important. Is it important to take it to that next step? What impact does that have on young people? And does education actually translate into people when they get older and are in positions of policymaking into behaviors that are better for the planet?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
So the concept of climate action is not something that we invented here in New York City. The international framework that was adopted back in 2015 is all about action for climate empowerment. We want to see more people out there feeling and being empowered to take action in their local communities or in their countries to address climate change or to push for policies that will mitigate or adapt to climate change.
So it's important for students to, first of all, see themselves as empowered agents that they can do this kind of work. Then they need to experience it, how to do it. "We don't know how to organize." We need to learn how to organize. And then, "How do you organize in an efficient, effective way?" This is thing that schools can teach. And climate is a wonderful case study. It's bring with this some risks because sometimes kids are going to experience failure and then there is something to do with it. That's good. That's good to develop their resilience and understanding of how to improve.
So climate action is part of an international discourse and now we are trying to do it at schools. I think both Judith and Ericka are telling us about how you need to scaffold it. So it's not enough to learn about. You need to know why you're doing this, you need to know what does this mean. You need to think about the different ways you can take action. Taking action is not only protesting on the street. Taking action is teaching the younger generation about what's going on. And it's taking it back to the families and educating the parents about what's going on. So there is so much that we can do in schools about developing this civic capacities around climate action.

Caroline Preston:
And Judith, I also wanted to pick up on something you talked about earlier about teachers who may be resistant to discussing climate change, teaching about it. In some cases, maybe they don't believe in human cause climate change themselves. So maybe starting with you and then others can weigh in, what are the barriers there? And is it a sort of not believing in climate change? Is it not feeling knowledgeable enough to teach about it? Why aren't there more teachers doing what you're doing?

Judith Felice:
Well, I met with a few of my colleagues when I had asked if my students can present in their classrooms. And because we are a great community of colleagues, everyone said yes, but there was a big but there. "Oh, but why are we doing this? That's not true. None of this stuff exists." I got that from many a teacher. And I said, "Well, listen, regardless of whether you agree that there is or there isn't, this is a great experience for the kids, so let's do it for them." And they obliged and were very supportive. But I think that big picture, that is a obstacle.
And that goes with anything, right? How is it that you're going to teach about something that you don't have a passion or you don't believe in it? Or you may be a little bit skeptical, but that's a difference in my opinion between a teacher and an educator. A teacher teaches a subject, an educator teaches life. And I think starting small with our teachers So not expecting them to implement a whole big culminating project that I did, first go around, then I think it'll be much more successful. But that resistance is real.

Caroline Preston:
Ericka, have you seen that too?

Ericka Blake:
Yes, to the extent of what was discussed before in terms of the mandates. Initially, when I first mentioned the issue of climate change, it was one or two teachers, they were like, "It's not real, this stuff's not real." I was like, "Okay, that's going to be a difficult push." And then the science teachers, I think what was on their mind was, "We got to get this curriculum. We teach about climate. We already teach about climate in our curriculum." So they felt they were straight. And the rest of us were just like, "Okay, well, how? How do we do this? How will it be implemented?"
So once we completed the research projects, we presented in front of the 10th graders. And what happened, I didn't really expect. The 10th graders, they were like, "Can we hear some more of those presentations? That was really good." And just because they were learning something new. So when the 10th graders started to express it, just one day of hearing about three presentations, the other teacher, when I mentioned, "Hey, we should..." When I was trying to push it for the PBL for next year, they were like, "Okay, yeah." You could see their eyes kind of opening up.
So I think just not knowing how was the initial kind of pushback in a sense. That's what I see. And fewer of the, "It's not real," but more of like, "Well, how do I do this? If this is what I have to teach, how do I put this in there as well?"

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
I just want to add something about teachers. Teachers are part of our society. And in the U.S., at this moment in time, we have a lot of misinformation and disinformation about climate. And I think teachers are out of this phenomena as well. So in our research, we see that many of them believe that climate change is happening. The question is whether they attribute it to human action. So we see a lot of confusion that, yes, it's humans, but it's also the natural patterns of the planet. And that confusion, I think, is what I think Judith is feeling sometimes in skepticism or not sure that it's urgent. And that's another thing we need to tackle. And a mandate, I'm sorry to go back to the mandate. Mandates are not going to solve this. A lot of investment in professional development for teachers like we do here at Teachers College, that's, I think, the way to move forward. We need to correct a lot of the misinformation that is out there.
The funny thing about misinformation, if I may share, is that in our public opinion research that we've done, we found that there is one thing that conservatives and liberal agree on, that we have to teach students how to identify misinformation and falsehoods because both sides believe that exist. So I think that could be a good way to start actually. Maybe that's a way to bring all the parents that might be skeptical together to interact with the data, to interact with the scientists, to interact with the students that can teach them something about this. There is so much potential here. I really see the skies is the limits.

Caroline Preston:
We've heard a lot of great examples of teaching climate change in different disciplines. I just want to make sure we have an opportunity to talk about any other innovative approaches that you all have seen or you've seen, Oren.
I know in my reporting, I've been struck by this sort of campus as a living lab model of using school buildings or college buildings as laboratories for studying one's impact on the environment, energy usage, really kind of using the campus as a learning tool. So that was one thing that jumped out at me, but are there other approaches that you're advocating and teaching or other innovative things you're seeing?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Using the campus facilities as a way to learn about climate change is a wonderful way to engage students. So with the teachers this summer, for example, we took them to a tool to the boiling room where you can learn about energy. You can learn about different sources of energies that schools are using throughout the year. And all of a sudden adults and kids are learning that, "Oh, for us to feel comfortable, there is a consequence. We need to do something to something in order to produce the heating and the cooling of the building." So I think using campus as a wonderful tool, living lab could be not only installing solar panels and then analyzing the data together. And it's not only about recycling or reducing waste, but it's also a living lab for climate action.
So one of, I think, the hidden sauce in schools in New York City is the green team. 50 plus percent of schools these days has a green team that brings together students and teachers, sometimes some admin, to do projects together on sustainability. And I think allowing kids to participate in this, to walk across grades, together with grownups, it's a way to build trust. It's a way to build civic capacity. And it's also a way to reflect about what does it mean to create change in society? What are the challenges? What kind of communication channels we need to use? Framing, presentation, all of these skills kids can learn when we treat school as a living lab.

Judith Felice:
Something I think that is part of our reality, everything costs money. So behind every initiative, behind every mandate, there needs to be a budget line. And to expect schools, teachers, parents to engage, there needs to be a financial investment in that particular goal. And yes, there are green teams, but that takes an educator in the school that is passionate and will give up their preps and lunch and stay after school and come in early. What happens if a school doesn't have one of those passionate educators? Then there's no green team. But if we feel, we as a community, we as the Department of Education, we, as the state of New York, believe that it is an important goal, and I'm assuming it is because now we have a mandate, then there needs to be money behind it. Then let's establish a role of a green team teacher. And they don't teach 25 periods a day. 25 periods a week, they'll teach 20. Maybe five periods that they don't teach is dedicated to that. That might be something that an educator said, "Okay, I'll do it."
In addition to a mandate, there needs to be a budget line and there needs to be some type of accountability because one district, one school may be wholeheartedly committed to the goal, but the school down the road may not be.

Ericka Blake:
I would definitely say community is key. Making that community and school partnership, building that intrinsic love for nature. I noticed my oldest daughter, the way she has my granddaughter, three years old, just in nature in every aspect. If they go to the beach, if they go to the park, she took her fishing. She's learning to love and appreciate her environment around her. So as she grows, her desire to have an appreciation for the planet, she's learning at a very young age.
What I'm doing with my students in terms of community, I'm a gardener, I'm part of a community garden, I bring my students to the garden. I let them know this is not a school trip. "Can I bring my little brother? Can I bring my cousin?" Absolutely. So that students can come be a part of something outside of the classroom, because that's where the real learning happens. That's like we went to the boiler room. "You could have told us about the boiler room and what happens in the energy, but we went there, we saw, we felt the heat."
So just being physically involved in the environment, in nature, builds an appreciation for it, which then awakens you to, "Wait a minute. What are we doing?" Or to the action part, "What can we do to sustain what we have and not cause any more damage?" So just building community, taking students outside, speaking with parents, getting parents involved is very important. Just getting everybody involved some way somehow to begin to appreciate what we have and really see and bring notice to it. So then we have the action that says, "Hey, let's do what we need to do to protect our environment."

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
So what I'm hearing us today reminds me of the '60s when we had the space race. And back then, President Kennedy and the NASA leaders were able to mobilize thousands of people to connect their daily actions in their little space, the little walkspace, to a bigger mission. There's a wonderful paper I read recently that captured that moment. The title is something like, "I'm not mopping the floor. I'm putting a man on the moon." Basically, President Kennedy and NASA were able to show people that what they do has bigger meaning.
So imagine that we are going to develop that meta story for the coming decade. And it's not Mars. Mars is great. Let's start with planet earth, protecting this home. And maybe sustainability is our big story, protecting it. And then education can serve as part of this bigger mission of sustainability. And I want teachers to say to themselves, "I'm not only teaching algebra one. I'm saving the planet. I'm not just supporting students who are bilingual. I'm saving the planet." Once we reframe the goal of education around that, I think all of the other pieces that we talked about tonight will really fall in line.

Caroline Preston:
I'm wondering if each of you in one sentence could complete this thought. Sustainability education matters now more than ever because... Oren, do you want to start?

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Because it's help us to generate hope, productive hope about the future.

Caroline Preston:
Judith, what about you?

Judith Felice:
What we instill in our students today will be the foundation to an amazing future.

Caroline Preston:
And Ericka, what about you? Sustainability education matters now more than ever because...

Ericka Blake:
The state of our planet is depending on us.

Caroline Preston:
Well, thank you so much for participating in this conversation, Oren Pizmony-Levy, Ericka Blake, Judith Felice.

Judith Felice:
Thank you.

Oren Pizmony-Levy:
Thank you so much.

Ericka Blake:
Thank you.

Thomas Bailey:
This conversation leaves me truly inspired and a little impatient because what Ericka and Judith are doing in their classrooms right now shows us what is possible. Their students are not just learning, they're teaching others. They're walking away feeling like they can do something about the world they're inheriting. This is what education is for, and that is what our public good initiative is about. Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time. How we respond will matter for the kind of society we become. So if you're a teacher, I hope this conversation gives you the ability to start small and build from there. If you're a school or district leader, I hope it challenges you to think about what real investment in this work looks like. And if you're a policymaker, I hope that it reminds you that a mandate without resources is not a solution.
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