Giving Compass' Take:

• A recent study published by Nature Climate Change found that students with a specialized climate-focused curriculum were effective in convincing their conservative parents to care about climate change.

• Can other schools across the district and in other states adopt a specialized curriculum? 

• Read about why some educators struggle to teach climate change science. 

Most Americans than ever (73% as of the end of 2018) now understand that climate change is real and is happening. But that still leaves millions who don’t, and attempts to change their minds in the past have often been unsuccessful. The best way to convince them might be children, who seem to be able to accomplish what news articles and advertising campaigns can’t.

In the study, published in Nature Climate Change, middle school students who were given a special curriculum about climate change were more likely to be concerned about climate change by the end of the school year than peers in other classes that only learned about climate as part of the state curriculum. But perhaps most critically, the parents of kids who got the special curriculum were also more likely to be concerned about climate change by the end of the year–particularly conservative parents who might have been least likely to change their minds in the past.

Previous research showed that kids can influence parents’ attitudes about other issues, and the researchers wanted to see if the same would be true for climate change. “We’ve seen climate change education has been very difficult to accomplish in the past, so this might just be a different way to communicate about this complex topic,” she says.

Students who had the new curriculum were more than three times more concerned about climate change, compared to students in a control group of classes that studied climate through the standard state lessons. Among parents, the biggest change happened with those who expressed conservative political views. It may have been successful, the researchers say, because kids typically don’t think about climate change ideologically, and because of the level of trust between parents and children.

Read the full article about changing mindsets about climate change by Adele Peters at Fast Company.