Co-creating and Researching STEAM Climate Change Resilience Curriculum with Students and TeachersBy Collaborative Advisory Council member, Kathryn Dawson, Associate Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance; Director, Drama for Schools, College of Fine Arts, The University of Texas at Austin ![]() The climate is changing. Communities that have been rendered vulnerable bear the brunt of cascading impacts from acute hazards that compound chronic stressors. Planet Texas 2050 (PT2050) at The University of Texas at Austin is a group of transdisciplinary researchers who work to build Texas’ resilience in the face of the climate crisis, employing traditional and community-based methods of research from a wide variety of disciplines, including the arts. Beginning in 2022, members of the Drama for Schools program in the College of Fine Arts at The University of Texas at Austin began to translate methods and data from PT2050’s research efforts to K-12 education using arts integration and STEAM project-based learning units. In doing so, The Drama for Schools team recognized that the entanglement of culture, well-being, and aspiration created complexity and anxiety for many young people’s relationship to climate change and their local environment (Hickman et al., 2021). Recent research on arts-based environmental justice methods argues for youth-led practices that engage vulnerability, listening, and the body as a site for making meaning and imagining possible environmental futures (Gallagher et al. 2022). Specifically, participatory action research (PAR) is noted as an effective way to structure collaborative approaches to educational research so students can have new relationships, roles, and pathways within educational improvement efforts (Cammorata & Fine, 2008; Dawson et al., 2025). Based on these arguments, the Climate Justice with Youth STEAM curriculum model was developed by Drama for Schools. In the project, university faculty and students work with K-12 teachers and students to co-design and co-research new, STEAM project-based learning units focused on climate resiliency. Our projects also reference our local climate equity plan that puts indigenous history and issues of racial and housing in/justice at the center of the effort to create a more just and equitable climate future for ALL. Drama for Schools’ 2024-2025 current Climate Justice with Youth project is based at The Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, a public STEM-focused secondary school in Austin, Texas. At the heart of the current project is the creation of a Student/Teacher Learning Community (STLC), made up of Ann Richards 7th grade and high school students and teachers. The STLC spent the fall of 2024 working closely with Drama for Schools and Planet Texas 2050 facilitators to co-design, co-facilitate, and co-research the impact of new arts-integrated climate resilience project-based learning units across the entire 7th grade curriculum. Each unit used the arts to activate young people’s relational knowledge regarding the climate so that students could understand, interrogate, compare, and share their experience and standpoint on the local climate crisis with each other. In December 2024 the STLC at Ann Richards hosted an "Action Through the Arts" festival. The student-designed event for the 6th and 7th grade students (360+) included student curated guest speakers sharing about local environmental justice issues, high school student facilitations about taking climate action at the school and in the city, 7th grade students showcasing their STEAM climate resilience projects for 6th grade students, theatre performances about students’ memories in nature, and a 7th grade-led eco-arts mini-workshop on endangered and threatened Texas species. The STLC has just begun to analyze our data from the project. Initial findings indicate the importance of hyper-local learning and that a focus on preferred futures and transdisciplinarity were central to increasing our climate change resilience. Our data aligns with research that argues that “images of the future” play a crucial role “in determining present actions and in motivating social change” (Paige and Lloyd, 2023, p. 22). In sum, we found that time spent using the arts to explore our individual relationship with the environment and our collective hopes and fears regarding local community climate change impacts was healing. Through an acknowledgement and tangle of our real fears regarding the climate crisis, we began to build our personal capacity to foster future-oriented perspectives centered in care and resilience for our home city and for each other. References Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (Eds.). (2010). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. Routledge. Dawson, K., & Lee, B. K. (2018). Drama-based pedagogy: Activating learning across the curriculum. Intellect Books. Fine, M. (2008). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. Routledge. Gallagher, K., Cardwell, N., Denichaud, D., & Valve, L. (2022). "The ecology of global, collaborative ethnography: metho-pedagogical moves in research on climate change with youth in pandemic times." Ethnography and Education 17(3), 259-274. Hickman, C., Marks, E., Pihkala, P., Clayton, S., Lewandowski, R. E., Mayall, E. E., ... & van Susteren, L. (2021). “Climate anxiety in children and young people and their beliefs about government responses to climate change: a global survey”. The Lancet Planetary Health, 5(12), e863-e873. Paige, K and Lloyd, D. (2023). “Eco-justice and transdisciplinary approaches to education in the era of the Anthropocene: advances towards teaching and learning in a diverse world,” edited by Lester-Irabinna Rigney, in Global Perspectives and New Challenges and Perspectives on Culturally Responsive Pedagogies: Superdiversity and Teaching Practices, Palgrave, 20-35.
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