I spent my summer as a Ford Scholar educating high school students from the Poughkeepsie area on the Climate Crisis. Working alongside Professor Pinar Batur and fellow Ford Scholar Sasha Allison, I assisted in designing and teaching a curriculum for the ESCI Exploring Climate Summer Intensive course, mentored three students and began work on an ongoing literary analysis project.

A student’s art project focused on the impact of plastics on the Earth.

Throughout the month of June, Professor Batur, Sasha and I worked together to create a syllabus for our portion of the intensive that covered the basics of climate change and its global implications. The intensive itself ran for three weeks and was made up multiple sessions each day, typically morning and afternoon lecture sessions followed by a college workshop put on by the Exploring College program. We taught the morning sessions of the first and third weeks and were accompanied by the Environmental Cooperative’s Jen Rubbo and Vassar’s Sustainability Director Micah Kenfield who taught the remainder of the sessions. Our lectures covered essential topics surrounding the Climate Crisis such as the foundations of climate science, a history of anthropogenic climate change, the effects of fossil fuels on people and the environment, environmental racism, and climate policy, among others. Along with nightly readings related to our lectures, students completed an art project and a final research project based on material learned in class and presented both over Zoom.

A slide from one student’s final project on ocean acidification and coral reefs.

A slide from another student’s final project on environmental racism.

Outside of designing and teaching the curriculum, I also had the opportunity to mentor three students throughout the intensive and begin analysis work on Buket Uzuner’s series The Adventures of Misfit Defne Kaman. Creating and teaching this course served as an excellent learning opportunity for me and illuminated the power of education in creating change.