#927: Designing Instruction to Expand Privileged Students’ Ideologies in the Context of Climate Change and Environmental Injustice

Given the manner in which climate change is intertwined with histories of racial-capitalism and colonialism and both historical and ongoing stories of community resistance, integrating the sociopolitical aspects of climate change with climate science is critical to learning about the subject as a whole. While a substantial body of literature is focused on how to engage students who are on the frontlines of climate injustice, here we ask how to meaningfully engage students of relative economic privilege in meaningful learning around climate and environmental justice. In this paper, we describe the design of a yearlong trajectory within a high school science class, meant to engage students in identifying and questioning dominant narratives within the culture of a particular school, paying specific attention to dominant narratives that assume the beneficence of STEM and industry (Morales-Doyle, 2025).