A Curriculum of Resilience: Increasing Personal Resilience through Environmental Education
Abstract
As more communities feel the impacts of climate change, the field of environmental
education (EE) has been incorporating climate change topics into EE curriculum. One
such topic, resilience, has begun to emerge. Most EE resilience activities focus on
ecological resilience rather than personal resilience, even though both of these concepts
are deeply intertwined with climate change. This paper explores a case study of resilience
in EE that explicitly connects personal and ecological resilience via a middle school
resilience curriculum co-created by researchers, resilience practitioners, and educators
in coastal North Carolina. This curriculum blends personal and ecological resilience
concepts using activities including storytelling. This study examines how teachers
responded to the co-created curriculum writing process and the resulting resilience
curriculum. Specifically, we asked, 1. What were teachers' perspectives on the challenges
and benefits of the co-creation curriculum design experience? 2. What were teachers’
perspectives on the challenges and benefits of teaching the interdisciplinary resilience
curriculum? Our initial results identified four themes of teacher-identified benefits
and five themes of teacher-identified challenges of resilience curriculum and curriculum
design experience. Benefits include themes like meeting a distinct local need and
engaging with like-minded professionals. Challenges include themes like the difficulty
of navigating middle school identities when trying to be vulnerable and students knowing
the right answers but having trouble applying those answers to their personal lives.
We will use these preliminary findings to iterate and improve on the curriculum and
design process to better serve the teachers and students in this area.
Type
Master's projectDepartment
Nicholas School of the EnvironmentSubject
environmental educationpersonal resilience
ecological resilience
curriculum
co-design
community resilience
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https://hdl.handle.net/10161/27147Citation
McCollum, Aurora (2023). A Curriculum of Resilience: Increasing Personal Resilience through Environmental Education.
Master's project, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/27147.Collections
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