Educating for a climate changed future - 8th CoP Gathering

Community of Practice for Climate-Resilient and Climate-Conscious Education

Every teacher working in a climate-disrupted world faces the same question: how do I prepare children not just for the planet as it was, but for the one they are inheriting?

In their new open-access book, Educating for a Climate Changed Future: From First Order Impacts to System Level Transformation, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Professor Fernando Reimers and SubjectToClimate’s Co-founder and Ashoka Fellow, Margaret Wang-Aghania map what it takes to build genuinely climate-ready education systems, from individual classrooms to national policy. Drawing on evidence from 11 education systems and 39 schools, they ask not only what is happening to schools because of climate change, but what schools can do about it.

Join us for our eighth gathering of the Community of Practice for Climate-Resilient and Climate-Conscious Education to hear their research, explore SubjectToClimate‘s open-access resources, and think together about what this means for the contexts you work in.

This session runs for 90 minutes and is designed to be a genuine exchange and dialogue.

Dr Reimers and Margaret will open by sharing their research and the framework at the heart of the book, distinguishing between the first-order effects of climate on education (disruption, displacement, infrastructure damage) and the second-order effects (how systems respond through curriculum, teacher development, school operations, and community engagement). They will also walk us through what SubjectToClimate offers as a free, open-access toolkit for educators.

The second half of the session belongs to the room. We will move into discussion:

What resonates with your context?
Where are the entry points for your organisation?
What barriers are you running into that the research helps name or that the research has not yet reached?

This gathering is open to anyone working on climate education, curriculum design, or teacher development in low- and middle-income country contexts, whether or not you have joined us before. If you are asking how to teach climate change in ways that build agency rather than anxiety, or how to move your organisation from responding to climate disruption toward shaping climate-ready learners, this space is for you.

More about Community of Practice (CoP) for Climate-Resilient and Climate-Conscious Education:

The Global Schools Forum early this year, launched a Community of Practice for Climate-Resilient and Climate-Conscious Education. Guided by the “Surviving (Receiver) & Thriving (Responder)” framework, this CoP focuses on practical, low-cost solutions from practitioners on the front lines. Structured in action-oriented sprints, we will build a repository of actionable resources, amplify a unified advocacy voice for future COPs, and serve as a strategic bridge to funders and policymakers.

This community thrives on the active participation of its members. Whether you come to listen, to share, or to lead, your voice matters.

Dr. Fernando M. Reimers

Dr. Fernando M. Reimers is the Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice in International Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Director of the Global Education Innovation Initiative. His work examines how education systems can better prepare children and young people for civic and economic participation, and how curriculum, teacher professional development, leadership, and policy can drive large-scale improvement aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. He is an elected member of the United States National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and served on UNESCO's Commission on the Futures of Education.

Margaret Wang-Aghania

Margaret is the co-founder and Executive Director of SubjectToClimate, a nonprofit that empowers ALL K-12 educators to teach climate action, reaching over 1.5 million visitors since 2021 launch. Through this work, she has been named an Ashoka Fellow. A former high school teacher, she saw the power of climate education to activate students and pursued an M.Ed. at Harvard, where she co-authored books on education reform and led climate trainings. She continues to teach and conduct research with Fernando Reimers at Harvard, with whom she recently released the book Educating for a Climate Changed Future. She has also worked as a product manager in edtech. Margaret earned her teaching certification at Princeton and is an avid marathoner and triathlete.

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