USING FIBER ARTS TO TEACH CLIMATE CHANGE AND MAKE AN IMPACT

Although those who teach climate change use extensive datasets to show how the rate of climate change has changed through time, many students find those to be numbers on the page without meaning or relevance to their lives. This can make it harder to reconcile a globally changing climate to what they are seeing around them. In order to get students to understand the seriousness of the climate emergency, we as science educators need to find a way to make climate change relevant to them so that the data has an emotional impact. In order to do this, I chose to use a common fiber art hobby that many people practice – crochet – to create a project that could be tied to annual temperature deviations to show how the global climate has changed year by year of their lives. I created a global climate blanket using NASA’s Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change data to create a tactile data chart to use with classes on Disasters and Global Climate Change.

When teaching with this climate change blanket, I always start out with the section that covers my own lifespan, indicating major life events on specific hexagons and noting how the temperature changed and how rapidly. This shows a personal connection between the data and my own life. I then do similar things by focusing on my students’ lifespans as well as the those of their grandparents. We use this to start a discussion about different generations’ perspectives on climate change and how climate change communication has changed over time.

By choosing a common crafting activity that many of them already do as a hobby, this helps students make a personal connection to the data because unlike some forms of scientific research, this is something they can do themselves with a skill many already have. This helps reduce barriers between students and the data. Students have proven they remember it and will bring it up in class discussion weeks later. Finally, it is a way for students to make connections between the data in the blanket to the headlines in the news by selecting which color hexagon they think will be next based on their perceptions of how the climate has been changing. They invariably choose a color that is lower than what the year’s data indicate. This is a powerful way to illustrate the disconnect between what is actually happening to our climate compared to what the public perceives is happening to our climate.