Barry Muchnick, assistant professor of environmental studies, published an article in June 2018 in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. In “The Challenge of Coordinated Climate Change Education,” Muchnick and his co-authors highlight how sustainability educators can more effectively engage their students with climate policy while also supporting students’ civic and change agent skills and dispositions to take on critical social, economic, and environmental challenges that require collective action. Muchnick and his collaborators share reflections on the Power Dialog, a twenty-state, multi-month, civically minded, coordinated climate change educational program developed for college students to provide input to state governments on the Clean Power Plan. The Power Dialog was crafted on theories and practices of democratic education, behavioral economics, policy theory, and up-to-date climate science and risk assessments. This reflection shows that factors in state government, strong inter-institutional networks and leadership, and programs inside of the universities themselves were critical for success.
