Climate Justice Education in Teacher Education
In June 2025, members of the SSHEAN team (Heather McGregor, Sara Karn, and Becca Evans), and our colleagues (Thashika Pillay, Alice Johnston, and Jennifer Williams), delivered a Climate Justice Field Camp for 33 teacher candidates.
The camp served as a pilot course and a research project, seeking to better understand whether supplementary camp-based learning in climate justice supports teacher preparation in Ontario.
We offered 12 hours of credited instruction in the Queen’s Bachelor of Education program over a weekend at Camp Davern in Maberly, Ontario, integrating time to connect with nature and each other.
Teacher candidates who enrolled in the course had already completed 72 hours of instruction in Environmental Education and were completing the final 2 months of a 16-month teacher education program at the time. Course participants were qualifying for any level (Kindergarten through grade 12) and could be specializing in any subject area.
The purpose of focusing on climate justice was to support teacher candidates to extend outwards—from familiarity and capability in classroom-based and outdoor Environmental Education as developed through prior learning—towards an increasing confidence with teaching about climate and intersecting crises (social, economic, political, etc.). A climate justice orientation to teaching recognizes that crises disproportionately affect populations who are already somehow marginalized such as Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, women, people of low socio-economic status, people with disabilities, and more-than-human species.
Guest speakers at the camp included David McLagan and Lindsay Borrows, both professors at Queen’s University. Their specialized knowledge brought learners’ attention to what justice and climate response involves in other sectors of research and society.
One participant said:
“I think a lot of our workshops were extremely informative and interesting. Especially Dave’s Indigenous Fire Traditions presentation and Lindsay’s land-based law session.”
Workshops led by Sara Karn, Becca Evans, Thashika Pillay, and Alice Johnston were held outdoors around camp. According to participants, the extended time outdoors made a significant difference to the way that learners engaged and were thinking about how to adapt the activities for their own outdoor teaching. They said:
“The class outdoors made me feel more connected to what we were learning and made me feel that I was able to focus more and take more away from the guest speakers and the workshops.”
“I think the part of this camp that I will be able to apply and use is the bringing the children outdoors to learn part. I think that this camp fully showed me how important this is.”
As the weekend course progressed, the workshops placed more emphasis on climate action. Guest speaker Victoria Renner of the Frontenac Arch Biosphere Network offered a presentation about the Youth Climate Action Summit and interactive ways to engage learners in understanding local ecosystems.
We also moved toward eliciting ideas and plans from the teacher candidates, including their own dreams for climate action projects. Using a participatory method called Pro Action Café, Jennifer Williams facilitated candidates in getting ready to take the next step on their climate justice and action journey. This element of camp was important to participants:
“While all activities were meaningful, this felt like a really good opportunity to actually hear some explicit ideas of how climate justice can be implemented for young learners. It definitely gave me a great catalogue of potential ideas I could subtly tweak or add to myself (or simply generate my own ideas).”
One of the central goals of the camp was to help teacher candidates identify the strengths and gifts they bring to climate justice work already, having developed an experience base, and skill set, throughout their BEd program, and even before it. Another goal was to make more visible to teacher candidates that this work need not be done alone; by acting as a member of a community focused on climate justice we can be more effective with our action, and the work will feel more rewarding too. While we may sometimes feel alone in teaching and in activism, when we look carefully, we see that we are connected to other educators, mentors, learners, and more-than-human teachers with whom we are interdependent! One participant reflected:
“I definitely struggle with climate anxiety and sometimes feel too small for such a large issue. However, I love that this camp focused on hope and optimism so I feel less anxiety around eco-anxiety. I especially appreciated seeing passionate leaders (facilitators) who seem optimistic, positive, and are already taking action and making positive change in terms of climate justice. This has made me want to continue my journey and find meaningful ways to contribute to climate justice.”
The camp was funded by an Impact SEED grant from the Queen’s Faculty of Education’s STEAM+ Research Group, the Queen’s Centre for Community Engagement and Social Change, and Rotary Kingston.
We are so thankful for this funding and excited to share the results of our teaching and research through future publications!
This website features research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
