Philstar.com tackles inadequacies in climate education

CHEERS TO Philstar.com’s special report that explored the challenges faced by teachers and students in discussing climate change. The first part was published on July 2; the second on July 9.
What’s the Story?
With stronger storms, worsening floods, and hotter temperatures, climate change is a reality that can no longer be ignored. Media coverage have reported on the climate crisis and its effects in the country, providing data on severity of heat or lack of rainfall, and the various changes in weather conditions and its seasons. But only a few reports have engaged the youth in exploring the issue.
Fortunately, Gaea Katreena Cabico and Cristina Chi provide a comprehensive view of the challenge confronting Filipinos who live in an archipelago on the rim of the Pacific. The two part-report deals with the challenge of preparing the next generation to address climate change. The story children as survivors of disasters dramatizes the urgent need to help them and their generation to learn from living experience more about the global phenomenon that threatens the world.
What the Report Got Right
The report pointed out that children are “disproportionately at risk of experiencing climate disasters” – as victims carry the trauma and fear long after the actual disaster, a strong typhoon or hot weather and the lack of water.
The two reporters checked out the basics tracking the efforts to teach students to understand the situation. They examined the way the climate crisis is taught. Interviewing students and teachers in schools in Marikina City and CALABARZON, they scrutinized quarterly requirements of their curriculum, when the subject is introduced and how much time given to its discussion.
The report ended up exposing all these good intentions unfulfilled, with efforts to develop lesson plans going to waste. Curricular requirements turn teaching into a bureaucratic exercise. Students complain that time give to the lessons are reduced to memorizing. Teachers complain about the obligation to observe the quarterly parameters, asking instead for flexibility. Teachers are painfully aware about their lack of preparation and capacity to make the issues of climate change understandable not just as text but as a living reality.
Teachers admit that for them to build a more interdisciplinary approach, they have to be given time to collaborate, to discuss how they can teach the science but also enrich the lived experience so students can more fully appreciate the enormity of the crisis.
Indeed, the report points to the perennial problems of lack that plague the educational system: not enough “qualified teachers,” skills training and learning resources, even classrooms.
Why Is this Important?
Climate change is now a crisis affecting daily life. It seems a no-brainer that the country needs better education that empowers children and the youth with knowledge and skills so they can help search for solutions, to be able to act in time to mitigate the severity of these conditions. The task of informing the people about climate change and the inadequacies of public education fall on the news media. Thankfully, the likes of Philstar.com seem up to the challenge.