Climate Education Empowering Students & Educators

A program with the potential of reframing how 500,000+ students understand and respond to climate change in the next 5 years.

Intersections, an accessible, solutions-based, and expert-designed initiative, (soon to be available in 150+ schools across LA) will give high school students globally the space to explore and pursue the intersection between their passions and skills and the climate movement.

What is Intersections?

A 7-module High School Climate-Ed Course

Comprised of 3.5 hours of interdisciplinary expert-taught, recorded lectures from the UC’s first complete climate program: Bending the Curve.

Why did we Build Intersections?

The Problem We Saw:

As the climate crisis and its effects grow exponentially in magnitude, much pressure is being placed on the youth to “be the solution.” However, there seems to be a discrepancy between youth's climate education/information and the tools/education they need to create real action.

While some programs exist to engage youth in the climate movement, the overwhelming focus is on students with previous interest in the issue. Climate change is a global issue that requires everyone’s buy-in, but this isn’t possible if only a small percentage of the population is actively involved and informed.

The Solution We Imagined:

The equitable integration of climate education and conversation into the high school curriculum and experience.

The curriculum brings multi-disciplinary engaging expert-led lectures to students and encourages them to have authentic dialogue with each other.

Above all, the program is tailored to the needs of individual schools, and doesn't burden admin, educators, or students but empowers them.

The Initiative We Built:

A solutions-based program (adapted from a University of California course) that aims to ground high school students in the realities of climate change through expert-taught lectures and complex and authentic students-led discussions. This occurs within a holistic wellness context that empowers students to discover and implement solutions that interweave their skills, passions, and community’s climate needs.

Bending the Curve is a trans-disciplinary curriculum and multimedia content library created by a team of researchers, educators, and designers at the University of California. All material focuses on climate change solutions to bend the warming curve and to accelerate resilience and climate justice for our planet’s most vulnerable people. Our course lectures were created by stitching together relevant snippets of Bending the Curve lectures to create a course that is shorter, more accessible and engaging for high school students.
To inform the development of our course, we completed a comprehensive survey of the climate attitudes among 250+ CA students. The goal of this survey wasn’t to extrapolate the beliefs of 258 students onto the American high and middle school population, but rather to gain a small slice of insight into the world that they are navigating concerning climate change. We often talk about Gen-Z as the generation charged with having to “save the world,” Climate change is a burden and responsibility that students are forced to grapple with. We attempted to translate our understanding of these results into effective climate education for students that inspires a more holistic understanding of the topic and empowers positive action.