Sometimes it’s the students who inspire the teacher. Tessa Ware was working as an educator in a high school in Costa Rica when her pupils and their vision of the world galvanized her.
Ware had been teaching lessons about sustainability. She realized that students were keenly aware of climate change and the problems it creates for the world. She also noticed trepidation as some students grappled with how to address the global crisis.
She wanted to find a way to empower action. “How can we give them agency? How can we change that into action rather than paralysis?” she asks.
Ware is from South Africa. She obtained a prestigious Fulbright student fellowship to dig deeper into such questions. The Fulbright program identified UMD’s Master of Environmental Education (MEEd) based on Ware’s educational goals. “I wanted to experience a good environmental education climate for myself before I work to develop curriculum,” she explains.
A semester into the MEEd program, Ware appreciates the faculty and coursework as well as Duluth’s natural environment. "Tessa has been a very engaged student since starting at UMD,” says Assistant Professor Elizabeth Boileau, her mentor. “She brings her previous knowledge and experience to class discussions and exudes passion for environmental education projects. It is clear that she is driven and will leave her mark in this field. This is the type of student we love to have in the MEEd program!"
Ware wants her work to have immediate practical applications. “I really want to do something to work with people practicing environmental education, to help support and deepen the curriculum,” she says.
She is “open to different options on how to support good climate change education,” and thinks it’s an issue to tackle with all age groups on multiple fronts. Ware also suggests that climate change is an essential topic to address across disciplines, including in business education, where critical thinking could spark new ideas and entrepreneurial efforts to remediate its impact.
In addition to formal educational institutions, she’d like to help integrate such education into “programs that are less formal and mark-based but have meaningful impacts on people.”