Climate & Teaching Anxiety

facilitating onward through layered fear

As climate action facilitators, we navigate multiple layers of climate anxiety.

We recognize the distress that others feel surrounding climate change and its impacts on ecological systems and human life, because we feel it, too. And, as we support others, we must continually support ourselves through grief that is (as grief is) ongoing, changing, and unpredictable.

Just the other day, as I was reading Katharine Hayhoe’s quote during a workshop I was leading:

It’s warming. It’s us. We’re sure. It’s bad. But we can fix it.

I got choked up in the grief of this statement. While I’m all for showing vulnerability as a facilitator, I had to take a deep breath and move past the lump in my throat, because I had a job to do.

So as facilitators, we learn to move through those moments of distress as they arise, and we’ve translated our own eco-anxiety into action by leading others.

But many of us carry another layer:

Teaching Anxiety

The long-studied concept of teacher anxiety is defined as the feelings of tension and anxiety that occur before, during, and after a teaching task. Feelings of teacher anxiety come and go; and are influenced by variables such as teachers’ and students’ characteristics, teaching strategies, time and classroom management, planning, and school climate may affect teaching anxiety levels (Aydin, 2021).

The affective experience we navigate as climate facilitators is often a combination of both climate anxiety (the unease of ecological degradation) and teaching anxiety (the unease of instructional doubting).

This culminates in a layering effect of climate + teaching anxiety.

Here’s a few examples of that layering:

Climate facilitators are engaging an ultra-multi-disciplinary topic. I’ll state the obvious - it’s impossible to know everything from all angles - yet climate conversations can stir up multiple subjects, varying values, and complex emotions in learners all in the span of a minute. Climate change is the ultimate, multi-disciplinary topic.

As facilitators, we must learn to cope with the feeling of ‘not knowing’ and not ‘having all the answers’ across the full breadth of climate change and action topics. Typically, ‘not having all the answers’ is an anxiety-provoking feeling for many educators. This is often rooted in implicit and underlying traditional beliefs that educators are the experts that are supposed to hold all the knowledge. Even when our teaching philosophy is rooted in very different beliefs of facilitation, learning, and instruction, the anxiety of appearing unknowledgeable can persist.

Climate facilitators are navigating climate action themselves. We are all learning how to imagine and live into resilient, climate-responsive futures for ourselves, our families, and communities. Many people are beacons of what is possible as they live on the leading edge of climate action. Others are stumbling through and just beginning to find their footing. Both are excellent and valued climate action facilitators. Both will always wonder if they’re living into their values and ‘walking the walk’ in fulsome ways.

As facilitators, we are continually building the self-confidence of navigating our own personal action-taking within the very societal conditions and systemic pressures that make climate action both necessary and challenging. I currently drive a gas vehicle and I’m working on commuting more by bike. That can niggle at me as a facilitator in ‘not being the perfect poster child’ of climate action. This is a moment of doubting myself - but I can’t let it eat away at my self-confidence in what I’m doing in facilitating hopeful conversations of climate change awareness and actioning.

Facilitators’ climate teaching practices are a growing skill. Many of the educators I work with are subject-matter experts first and foremost. Expertise in the topic area is the primary focus. Teaching is the secondary activity. Many climate facilitators are similar - they have come into facilitating climate action because of their passion, interest, and expertise in their field of climate change work. For example, the passionate environmental scientist who’s translating their research into citizen engagement. Even those who teach professionally (i.e. primary and secondary school educators, post-secondary faculty) may find this resonates in that their climate change-focused facilitation requires different strategies than they’ve engaged in the past, and so they feel as though they’re learning radically different approaches to designing, planning, and facilitating learning.

Research shows that teaching anxiety tends to increase when facilitators feel inexperienced in some way - whether that be because teaching itself is a new endeavor, or because we’re facilitating in a way that feels new and not yet refined.

What resonates with you?

If climate & teaching anxiety resonates with you as a climate-responsive facilitator, what are the nuances of those feelings for you? In what conditions do you feel the climate & teaching anxiety arise? How do you feel the fear and facilitate onwards?

Today I’ve focused more on three conditions exploring this layered anxiety. In a future post, I’ll shift my focus to what we can do to honour these feelings of anxiety and move through them as they arise in our facilitation practices.

I’d love to hear from you - both your own experiences of teaching anxiety and your strategies.!

Verdive Learning is a community for climate-oriented facilitators. I write about the inner work of grounding and sustaining your facilitation practice in your authentic climate action gifts, and the outer work of developing creative facilitation strategies, designing experiences that move people to awareness then action, and crafting facilitative activities that help others learn and grow toward climate-resilient futures. I’d love for you to subscribe! - Wren.

A note on the cover image: The wood grain is a tangential section of a Sumach or Stag Horn, adapted from the work of Romeyn Beck Hough (1857 - 1924), who published his samples in The American Woods, a collection of more than 1000 paper-thin wood samples representing more than 350 varieties of North American tree collected between 1888–1913. Learn More.