Physical Climate Storylining in the Introductory Undergraduate Classroom: a transdisciplinary approach

Physical Climate Storylining (PCS) is an approach developed by climate scientists as a promising alternative and complement to probabilistic methods dominant in climate change research. Since uncertainties in climate projections expand from global to regional to local spatiotemporal scales, conventional probabilistic approaches are not generally useful for local climate adaptation. Recent research suggests that PCS can enable us to understand local current and future manifestations of climate change, with the potential to make climate science information useful and actionable for communities on the ground. The usefulness of PCS in the educational context has not been widely explored. This talk presents preliminary results of a qualitative, mixed methods pilot study in two undergraduate Earth science classes at a public US university, introducing a pluralized form of PCS in the context of extreme weather and the possible causal connection to climate change, and expanding it to include social-ethical concerns relevant to climate impacts. Students explore one or more of four case studies through a pluralized PCS approach. Preliminary results indicate greater student engagement, and a better understanding of the interplay of physical climatic phenomena with the socio-ethical dimension in the wider context of the real world. This work is an extension of the author’s development of a transdisciplinary, justice-centered pedagogy of climate change (Singh, 2024).