Dear Faculty Collaborators & Potential Collaborators,
Each April, we hold a showcase of student works—creative expressions of climate stories in a wide variety of visual and performing arts media. We invite your Fall or Spring class to participate!
Here’s how it works—You’ll create an assignment appropriate to your class (or adapt an existing assignment) asking students to use a creative medium to express the story of those who are affected by and/or taking action to address climate change. We expect student works to be quite diverse in terms of the stories expressed and the creative media employed. Our previous Showcase exhibits featured paintings, drawings, graphic design, zines, comic strips, audio pieces and video pieces, and the performance program featured readings of poems and narratives and performances of original short plays. See photos from our previous Showcase exhibits to get ideas.
There’s a lot of flexibility in terms of the kind of Climate Stories assignments you can give your students, and we are here to support you, including:
- Consultation: We can meet with you one-on-one to talk about your course and what kind of assignment will work best within the context of your course goals.
- Class Visits: We can come to your class and give a presentation that provides context that’s tailored to your class in terms of content and length (about climate change, climate communication, the climate arts, the Collaborative and Showcase). We enjoy these immensely! Class visits really help students understand the “why” and help them feel that they are really a part of this broader Climate Stories community.
- Online Resources: We’re compiling resources for collaborators in this Google folder. It includes resources about creative climate expression, resources on the lived experiences of climate change (if your students need help figuring out what/whose climate story they might tell), a folder of scholarly articles about storytelling and climate communication, and a folder with examples of climate stories assignments that faculty have used to engage their classes in previous Showcases.
Contact co-facilitator Laura England (Sustainable Development) for more information or to set up a consultation.