Faculty Learning Communities (2024 - 2025)

Members of the Metro College Success Program in the College of Ethnic Studies

Topic: This Faculty Learning Community (FLC) was established to empower faculty to integrate climate change and climate justice into their teaching for the first time. Our focus was on embedding these themes into two core Metro Ethnic Studies courses:

• ETHS 241: History of Social Movements
• ETHS 221: Health Equity & Social Justice

The SFSU Nature Rx Initiative was conceived out of the expressed needs and interests of BIPOC SFSU students to be in relationship with nature and engage in ancestral healing practices.We are working on formalizing the SFSU Nature Rx Initiative by supporting METRO faculty members to incorporate climate justice into two of their existing core courses for the first time. We are also engaging in building strategic partnerships. Our FLC team offered decolonizing, ancestral, nature-centered experiences that were mapped out into METRO’s core courses. The team consisted of Agent of Change (AOC) fellow students that received AOC scholarship and 699 independent study units. We engaged in reciprocal educational exchange of curriculum from faculty, staff, and student perspectives.

Pedagogical Outcomes:

Instructional Materials and Pedagogical Resources

• Created a robust set of instructional materials to support climate justice pedagogy:
  • Lesson Plans: Each plan includes chapter summaries, discussion questions, journaling prompts, and interactive activities.
  • Assignments: Designed reflective assignments that connect climate justice to students’ lived experiences and community contexts.
  • Reading & short film list: Curated a diverse set of readings centering BIPOC voices in environmental movements, including works by Indigenous, Black, and Latinx scholars and activists.
  • All materials were collaboratively developed by Agents of Change (AOC) fellows and are housed in a shared digital repository for ongoing use and refinement.
  • Lesson Plan folder included in box folder
  • Chapter Sources curated from
    • Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth, and Katharine K. Wilkinson, editors. All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. First edition, One World, 2020

Community Collaboration & Wellness

• Nature Rx mini green brakes were incorporated in the ETHS course. A holistic approach to wellness was centered in the class culture. The course integrated heart, mind, body and spirit in the pursuit for social justice and environmental stewardship.
• Identified and established relationships with BIPOC climate justice leaders and organizations to serve as future guest lecturers and collaborators.
• SFSU Nature Rx initiative was able to strengthen its ties with organizations, particularly through Earth Week programming.

Figure 1: Hood to Woods' Earth Week panel highlights BIPOC students' healing journeys in nature

Members from the Department of Elementary Education

Topic: This FLC focused on the use of bilingual children’s literature as an entry point for teaching climate justice in preschool through grade one classrooms. Members studied and incorporated the four elemental books by Jorge Argueta—Water Little Water / Agua Aguita, Fire Little Fire / Fuego Fueguito, Wind Little Wind / Viento Vientito, and Earth Little Earth / Tierra Tierrita—to spark conversations with young learners about their experiences with the natural world. The group also examined scholarly articles on children’s environmental literature, early childhood perceptions of ecology, and educators’ roles in fostering environmental awareness. Together, these resources provided a foundation for rethinking how stories, language, and classroom practices can make climate justice accessible and engaging for very young children.

Pedagogical Outcomes:

Through shared inquiry and classroom practice, the FLC identified several key shifts in pedagogy. Teachers refined their language use to better communicate concepts of sustainability and interconnectedness, helping children link everyday experiences with larger ecological systems. Activities such as read-alouds and journaling encouraged students to make personal and cultural connections, while also practicing observation and reflection. The FLC developed strategies for embedding climate justice themes into everyday instruction across language arts, science, and art. At the course level, new assignments were designed for SFSU teacher education that require students to critically analyze children’s books for climate justice content and to implement interactive read-alouds with follow-up activities. Collectively, these outcomes highlighted the value of children’s literature as a developmentally responsive, culturally relevant, and inquiry-driven pathway for building climate awareness in early education.

Members of the Latina/Latino Studies department

Topic: Latina/o/x communities are facing disproportionate impacts of climate change such as increased exposure to living in areas (more than half of Latinos) that have experienced extreme weather events and the fact that Latin@s are 43% more likely to live in areas with extreme weather temperatures (UnidosUs Blog, 2024). Our FLC will be focused on identifying both the climate justice issues for Latina/o/xs in the SF Bay Area and the organizing on these issues that is already happening. We will link these issues and activism to our field trips for our LTNS courses.

Pedagogical outcomes:

Our proposed pedagogical outcome was to create a set of lesson plans for environmental justice field trips in our LTNS courses. We aimed to integrate content related to Environmental Justice and make connections to campus art and Environmental Justice issues. Lesson plan names, locations, classes they will serve and links to the full document are found in Table A below.

Members of the Department of Asian American Studies

Topic: The Department of Asian American Studies has not taught its dedicated course on environmental justice in years, so our hope is to provide several opportunities for faculty and students of Asian American Studies to learn and engage with climate justice in and outside of the classroom.  Utilizing pedagogical tools and theoretical frameworks from Asian American Studies and climate justice, we insist that community organizing and the humanities are central to our ability to survive and resist.

Pedagogical outcomes:

Course: AAS 710: Critical Approaches to Asian American Studies. 

• New reading: Two chapters from Laotian Daughters: Building Towards Community, Belonging and Environmental Justice.
  • Seminar Discussion Agenda for this reading can be found here.
• New class activity: I utilized Asian Pacific Environmental Network’s (APEN) Introduction to Environmental Justice training to facilitate a jeopardy game on “toxics, housing and community” and facilitated a discussion on ethnography and environmental justice.

Course: AAS 212: Asian Americans and Mass Media

• New reading assignment:  A Village Called Versailles (2009), the film narrates the story of a Vietnamese American community in New Orleans East who protested against the government's proposal of a toxic landfill near their neighborhood after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. 

Course: AAS 216: Introduction to Asian American Literature

• New activity: Assignment that focuses on the use of ecocritical reading of Asian American texts, including Maxine Hong Kingston’s chapter on White Tiger in The Woman Warrior. 

Members of the SFSU School of Engineering

Topic: The current curriculum in the School of Engineering often neglects the social aspects of energy technologies and climate science in favor of technical considerations. In this project, we will integrate climate justice into core engineering courses at all academic levels through the creation of class activities that seamlessly combine technical and social perspectives. Through this, we aim to foster a more cohesive and reinforced understanding amongst SFSU’s engineering students of the sociotechnical nature of climate issues.

Pedagogical outcomes:

To achieve these learning objectives and our overall goal of incorporating climate justice across multiple engineering courses, we worked in pairs to develop interventions at three points in the curriculum: the first year, core courses, and upper-division project-based courses. These efforts are summarized here.

New assignment: Climate-focused Call for Designs in Introduction to Engineering (first-year course)

Introduction to Engineering (ENGR 100) was redesigned in 2021-2023 to be centered around a semester-long, open-ended design project (assignment document here). Students work in teams to identify a problem, validate that problem, then propose and explore potential sociotechnical solutions to that problem. Each semester, all the ENGR 100 students are given a different Call for Designs, which provides a single, broad theme to guide their problem-definition activities. As part of our work for the FLC, we decided to write a Call for Designs that explicitly incorporates climate justice. For the Fall 2025 semester, the ENGR 100 Call for Designs will be focused on flooding caused by climate change and its impact on marginalized groups (e.g. low-income communities, unhoused, people living in low-income countries).

New assignment: Climate justice in core undergraduate engineering courses

Designing course projects related to technical topics in undergraduate courses, and how they relate to climate justice: For example, in ENGR 467, comparing the performance of single-glazed and double/triple-glazed windows and how each contributes to undesirable energy gain in summer and energy loss in winter through the windows, and how that raises climate justice issues (assignment document here). In ENGR 303, students can compare the performance, energy consumption and carbon emissions of traditional versus modern heating/cooling systems in residential homes (e.g., gas furnace, heat pump, etc.) and discussing how that can raise a climate justice issue, who will be mostly affected by it, what role do engineers play, etc. 

Work in progress: 1) designing an assessment rubric for student projects. 2) How can we introduce/integrate the subject of “work ethics” into these courses as a follow-up strategy to stay connected with the climate/social justice subject?

Integrating social justice concepts into the technical work through homework assignments: A key challenge when adding social justice topics to core engineering classes is ensuring that the topics are integrated into the technical concepts with equal weight and importance. Often, the social justice component is presented as an afterthought to the technical material. Therefore, new homework assignments were developed for ENGR 303 which leverage concepts of social justice to reinforce understanding of technical concepts. The environmental justice topics are also selected to be concepts that the students are likely familiar with in their everyday lives (energy burdens, aging rental homes, thermal pollution in the bay, etc).

New lectures: Incorporating climate justice into project-based learning in upper-division engineering courses

have created lectures which will be given while students design and implement a semester-long project in ENGR 340 (Programming Methodology for Engineers) and ENGR 697 (Engineering Design Project) [for example, Climate Change and Tech lecture slides and Climate justice and Engineering lecture slides]. These changes aim to a) introduce the concepts of climate justice to students, b) support student recognition of the climate impact of current common technologies, c) identify how the design and implementation of a technological system affects climate, d) encourage students to critically reflect on how they can design their own projects to reduce their climate impact. Specifically, students will work with their project teams to answer questions including, "What feedback would the environment give you about your product?" and "What is the most unsustainable behavior your product encourages?" in the context of their projects. 

Members of Criminal Justice and Race and Resistance Studies departments

Topic:  All scholars in this FLC are committed to advancing social justice in our communities through the eradication of prisons and all other interconnected and interdependent oppressive systems and institutions. As a collective, we understand the struggle toward prison abolition is inherently connected to climate justice. Our group engaged in deep study to incorporate and mesh issues related to criminal justice studies and climate justice; our intention was to incorporate the intersection of prison abolition and climate justice into our courses by adapting our syllabus and course materials. 

Pedagogical outcomes:

As a collective, we teach various courses in the Department of Criminal Justice Studies ranging from as CJ 450 Jails and Prisons and CJ 200 Constructions of Crime and Justice to CJ 300 Criminal Justice: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, CJ 230: Crime, Data and Analysis. We each incorporated one week to the intersection of climate justice and criminal justice studies (super module) into our courses. To supplement that week and allow students to delve deeper into the connections between prison abolition and climate justice, we will host a panel for our collective students across our eight to ten classes. Thus, the pedagogical outcome from the FLC includes a week focused solely on incorporating climate justice into criminal justice studies and hosting a panel on campus for our students. Additionally, we aspire to locate Bay Area community-based organizations that work at these intersections to invite for an event on campus.

Links to sources for Climate Justice and Criminal Justice Super Module:

Video Lectures/Panels

 The Struggle for Environmental Justice in U.S. Prisons and Jails

Study and Struggle Critical Conversation #2: Abolition Must Be Green Melanie Yazzie outlines the fundamentals of the Red Deal

Documentaries

Concrete and Sunshine by Nicole Cousino And Water Brings Tomorrow — Ashley Hunt

Podcasts

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition, the Climate Crisis and What Must Be Done | Truthout

Literature

Miyake, Keith, “Abolition-Democracy and the Future of Climate Change.” Nature and Space 0,0 (2024):1-21

Miyake, Keith, “The Racial Environmental State and Abolition Geography in California’s Central Valley.”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39, 4 (2021): 590-608.

Nick Estes, A Red Deal.

https://jacobin.com/2019/08/red-deal-green-new-deal-ecosocialism-decolonization-indigenous-re sistance-environment

“The Principles of Environmental Justice” from the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit

Max Ajl, A People’s Green New Deal. London: Pluto Press, 2021.

Members of the Departments of Environmental Studies, Communication Studies, Recreation, Parks, Tourism and Holistic Health, Counseling, International Business, Philosophy and Nursing at UC Davis

Topic: Our Faculty Learning Community (FLC) addressed climate anxiety among college students, which can be defined as the feeling of distress or worry about the adverse impacts of climate change on the planet and human existence. Climate anxiety can lead to feelings of hopelessness, overwhelm and inaction. Our group explored skills to reduce climate anxiety, such as mindfulness meditation, to promote psychological resilience, as well as communication and advocacy skills that can be incorporated into the classroom to transform climate anxiety into action-based climate justice projects.

Our group reviewed course materials from the University of California (UC) Climate Resilience Course that was developed by scientists at the intersection of climate change and mental health and is currently being offered across 10 UC campuses. San Francisco State University students across all majors have consistently requested support and curriculum focused on the mental health aspects of climate change, including climate grief and anxiety. This FLC group is our first concerted effort to respond to this specific request from students. Faculty in our group aimed to learn the content, practices, and skills and incorporate elements of the 15-week curriculum into existing courses. These included assigned readings, videotaped interviews with diverse thought leaders in the fields of climate change, mental health, and climate action, contemplative practices to reduce climate anxiety, such as mindful breathing, movement and meditation, mindfulness in nature, and compassion practices, communication skills to discuss and advocate for climate justice with others, and group assignments to develop a climate change project that can be integrated into current course curricula.

Pedagogical outcomes:

New course materials: Communication Studies Syllabus Change. 

Pedagogically, participation in this FLC has helped me imagine a new unit for “Health Communication” (COMM 527), one of the higher-density upper-division classes I regularly teach. In its current form, “Health Communication” currently introduces students to the intersection of communication and public health, such as ideas like the social determinants of health, health literacy, health justice, and health equity. The new unit will highlight the intersection of health communication with the environment and climate change. Key informational resources might include:

American Medical Association (AMA) public statement on climate change (Policy H-135.938, “Global Climate Change and Human Health (link))

World Health Organization (WHO) website dedicated to Climate Change and Health (link)

Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health ( ink) Climate Communication on “Human Health” (link)

Members of the Department of Nutrition

Topic: Nutrition, food systems, and climate change are integrally connected and each can impact the other, both positively and negatively. Students can better serve populations by better understanding what factors impact climate change and how that, in turn, can lead to food and nutrition inequalities. With more knowledge and resources on the interactions between nutrition, food systems, and climate change, students can better work towards equitable food systems and improved nutrition in clinical and community nutrition settings.

Pedagogical Outcomes: As a result of our Faculty Learning Community (FLC) we developed and revised learning objectives and artifacts (including assignments, discussions, lectures) for integration into four Nutrition and Dietetics courses:

1. FCS 355: Nutrition for Wellness (UD-B)
2. NUTR 253: Diet, Health & Disease
3. NUTR 353: GWAR - Foodservice Systems Management
4. NUTR 357: Principles of Food Preparation (UD-B)

 These artifacts include classroom activities focused on food purchasing habits, waste tracking, sustainability discussion forums, and application of sustainable principles in campus food systems. A syllabus change and additional assignment aligned with sustainable food systems were developed for each course.

Members of the School of Design

Topic: Integrating climate justice into industrial and visual communication design curriculum to expand and strengthen pedagogical approaches to design ethics. Concepts of climate justice will serve as links between sociopolitical and environmental concerns to inform and support design education and practice.

Pedagogical Outcomes:

New module: DES 356 History of Design and Technology 

This is a required undergraduate survey course taken by all DES majors and serves roughly 200 students per academic year. The climate justice module consists of:

1. A 10-minute video module introducing climate injustice, climate justice, and the pillars of climate justice
2. A publicly available TED talk by architect Diebedo Francis Kéré that show how climate justice can be applied in design (about 20 mins)
3. Analytic and reflective prompts that can be used as written homework prompts or as discussion prompts in class. Case study details and assignment prompts could be found in this document.

Because items (1) and (2) are available digitally, this module can be delivered in a variety of learning modes, from online asynchronous to online synchronous to FTF. Depending on the specific mode, one might choose a written homework or a collaborative discussion for (3).

In order to offer multiple means of action and expression, according to principles of Universal Design for Learning, one could also substitute alternate activities for (3) such as a video feedback assignment, engagement in online chats, or creating visuals or posters to demonstrate learning. In short, demonstration of learning can also be flexible as needed.

Revision of course assignment: DES 324GW: Research and Writing in Design 

A major course assignment was revised to require students to research and prototype a guerrilla marketing campaign around the theme “AI and the Future of Design”, with an emphasis on environmental sustainability. As a part of the assignment, students were asked to assess the carbon footprint of potential materials (e.g. vinyl stickers, wheat paste posters, QR code tags) and to seek out more sustainable options (e.g, recycled paper, digital-only interventions etc). This critical reflection became a required component of their final design proposal and presentation.

New climate justice assignment: DES 427: Interaction Design (II) 

The pedagogical approach to DES 427: Interaction Design (II) shifted significantly in response to the urgent need for climate literacy and justice in design education. Inspired by educator resources in All We Can Save, this course was reframed through Dr Leah Stoke’s concept of “Widening Circles” - a framework that encourages students to begin their climate action at the individual level and expand their impact outward into their communities and institutions. To introduce part of this new framework, the course will use a new assignment titled “Designing for the Anthropocene Future: Mobile App Prototype.” In this project, students will use ProtoPie to prototype an interactive mobile app that responds to the realities of climate change and encourages climate- conscious behaviors, systems thinking, or community resilience. The project invites students to explore design from a sustainable, emotional, and speculative perspective—imagining tools that might exist in a world transformed by climate crisis.

Assignment revisions: DES 425 Graphic Design II (required class) 

The Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for the class focus on typography, typesetting, composition, software best practices, and visual communication. Previous to the shift the assignment asked students to apply typographic skills to organize complex text to market a series of events at Golden Gate Park (GGP) into a poster and a booklet. New learning outcomes include understanding what climate justice is in order to design:

1. branding for the event,
2. a poster. The poster must communicate the conference and the various talks, workshops, and panels through typographic organization, hierarchy and imagery,
3. a conference booklet. The booklet includes upfront materials about climate change, climate justice, and indigenous knowledge. It also has all the abstracts for the talks, panels, and workshops. Students must organize the type, develop a navigational system for the booklet, and communicate the overarching theme of the conference through imagery.

New lecture: Climate Justice Lecture in DES.505 Senior Design Project

The core reference for this lecture will be the UC Six Pillars of Climate Justice framework. The lecture will introduce students to the framework, discussing each of the pillars in relation to the field of design, utilizing previously identified illustrative case studies to support understanding and discussion. The case studies will be selected in relation to the specific projects that students are working on each semester to facilitate connections between examples of good practice, and their own class work.

This core reference – the Six Pillars framework – will add to references already in use (though somewhat loosely), including the abovementioned Ostrom’s principles for management of the commons  and Noel’s critical alphabet(), a design-specific reference of multiple concepts that promote reflection – through the use of provocative prompts – in relation to issues of a critical nature such as intersectionality, racial bias, positionality, linguistic hegemony etc.

With the inclusion of this lecture, it is expected that students will be better prepared to incorporate climate justice concepts in their class work (practice), as well as utilize a common reference to support critical thinking (reflection).