Tacoma kids went on a climate strike Friday. At Lincoln, so did many of the teachers
When the kids filed out of Lincoln, Carinna Tarvin, a social studies teacher at the Tacoma high school, stayed in the classroom.
She was with the students in spirit, however, and wasn’t alone among her colleagues at Lincoln.
Friday marked the latest in a series of Youth Climate Strikes to hit Tacoma. This time around, young climate activists who chose to participate converged on Tollefson Plaza downtown at noon.
Again, the kids did their part to draw attention to the man-made climate crisis, and, again, they called for action from adults in charge.
Inspired by now well-known youth climate activist Greta Thunberg, similar demonstrations, big and small, occurred around the world.
At Lincoln, meanwhile, Tarvin and more than a dozen other teachers — across multiple disciplines — were doing their part to “show solidarity with the youth movement,” as she put it.
Tarvin called it a “curriculum strike.” Basically, it means that while some kids were striking, she and other educators were dedicating all day Friday to lessons about climate change and its impacts.
“I have been wondering and looking for something I can do with my skill set that will change something or make a bigger impact. My skill set involves writing lesson plans,” Tarvin joked.
“Something needs to be done. This is a crisis,” she continued, explaining her reasoning for taking part. “It just felt important to take a pause and acknowledge what’s going on. It’s not going to happen otherwise.”
Tarvin and others at Lincoln were well aware that the all-day emphasis on climate change — in the bizarro world we live in where it’s still debated as fact or fiction — carried with it the potential to stir silly partisan blow back.
Luckily, Lincoln principal Pat Erwin and Marie Verhaar, assistant superintendent of teaching and learning at Tacoma Public Schools, had their backs.
As they should.
Given the stakes, devoting a full day to climate change lessons, across disciplines, is really the least we should be doing.
If we’re ever going to make any real progress toward addressing it, we need as many people as possible — including teachers — actively and vocally working to confront it, even if it sends deniers into conniption fits.
Verhaar described the curriculum strike as “a terrific teaching strategy to tie in current events that students are passionate about as a way to get them engaged in the lessons and discussion.”
Erwin was more direct.
“Bottom line for us is that learning needs to have authentic connections to both today and the future, and, seeing as our students will be facing this crisis for the rest of their lives, it is our duty to connect our teaching to this subject,” the principal explained via email. “We do this in a compelling and connected way, so we are not simply teaching climate change, but aligning it to our content when it fits.”
For Tarvin, who teaches 10th grade AP world history and 11th grade U.S. history, it wasn’t hard to craft a lesson centered on climate change and the youth climate strikes, she said.
In addition to facts and science, Tarvin planned to spend the day leading discussions about civil disobedience, the fossil-fuel divestment movement and the local impact of a warming planet, she told The News Tribune.
In total, Tarvin and Natalie Reszka, a 9th and 10th grade science teacher at the school, estimated that more than 30 Lincoln teachers participated in Friday’s curriculum strike. In addition to science and social studies teachers, the list included English, world language and math teachers.
Reszka, who advises Lincoln’s relatively new Climate Change Club, also said it wasn’t hard for her to teach about climate change — or unusual.
She did change her approach slightly on Friday, though.
“Personally, since I am constantly teaching climate change woven into all of my units in biology and chemistry ... I chose to take the stand of only having a conversation about human impact,” Reszka explained, saying she tried to “stand in solidarity with the Lincoln Climate Change Club.”
“This is a break from my typical science-driven conversations with students, so they are feeling the impact of the Curriculum Strike that way,” she added.
Together with the assistance of 350 Tacoma, an upstart grassroots climate advocacy group that has recently emerged, Reszka and Tarvin said they helped other teachers develop lesson plans.
Clearly, based on the widespread participation Friday, the work was not done in vain.
For both Reszka and Tarvin, instigating a curriculum strike at Lincoln, in particular, felt important they said.
Lincoln’s student population is one of the most diverse in the city. Reszka noted that “the majority of our students at Lincoln are from communities of lower socioeconomic status than other parts of Tacoma.”
“It has been said that climate change will continue to exacerbate any inequities,” Reska said, adding that people of color, low-income families and the disabled, among other vulnerable groups, will be “affected at a much more dramatic rate than the suburban, privileged communities, or rich leaders of society.”
Historically, Tarvin added, students of color and those from challenged socioeconomic backgrounds have often been left out of the climate change conversation and activism around it.
She noticed the latter back in September when the last youth climate strike occurred in Tacoma.
Despite a healthy youth turnout, few if any Lincoln students knew about it or participated, she observed.
For Tarvin, that raised questions of both equity and geography
At the very least, she decided, this time kids at Lincoln would know about.
“I’m sure the kids who were involved with the climate strike in September have a lot in common with my students — they just didn’t know about it,” Tarvin said.
“I feel like this is a really big moment, historically,” Tarvin added. “In 10 years, or 20 years, (students are) going to look back, wherever we go from here. I want them to have had the opportunity to get involved, so they can look back and say, ‘At least I did what I could, or at least I knew about it.’”
I couldn’t agree more.
This story was originally published December 7, 2019 at 6:00 AM.
