If you are teaching climate leadership you are taking on one of the most challenging pedagogical missions of our time. What we know about teaching climate leadership and environmental sustainability boils down to three questions: what should we teach, how should we teach it, and where should we teach it?
For an article for the Journal of Management Education Special 50th Anniversary Issue, I found nearly 100 articles on teaching climate leadership. Thanks to a grant from Sage Publications, my article Teaching to Save the Planet: The Challenges Ahead for Instructors, Business Schools, and Universities is free to all. One clear trend is that business schools alone cannot adequately teach sustainability. That must be a university-wide effort. I enjoyed exploring these ideas on the JME podcast series with Dr. Amy L. Kenworthy, Professor of Management at Bond University and chair of the path-breaking international Research in Management Learning and Education (RMLE) Unconference (www.rmle.org).
My book Lead for the Planet: Five Practices for Confronting Climate Change (The University of Toronto Press, 2020) is the basis for university-wide change-oriented courses on environmental sustainability. It applies social science to climate leadership across all levels of systems, helping both students and concerned citizens take on the twin challenges of climate change and energy evolution. The book anchors integrative, interdisciplinary university courses on climate leadership and supplements readings in courses like climate science, entrepreneurship, and business strategy. The five practices also serve as a benchmark for evaluating the content of university courses and curricula on climate change. The book is accompanied by The Lead for the Planet Handbook (free on this website).
Daniel Nyberg, Professor of Management, Newcastle Business School, and co-author of Climate Change, Capitalism, and Corporations: Processes of Creative Self-Destruction, writes that: "The book takes the reader by the hand and clears the way through the thorny and political field of climate change with grace and intelligence. With simple and clear language, the book confronts what is seen as a complex and overwhelming problem. The beauty of the book is making strong climate actions obvious by unpacking five practices – seek the truth, evaluate the risk, weight the decision, take a leadership role, and act collectively – that after Rae André's clarifications are no-brainers. The great achievement of the book is making it so obvious and clear to act on climate change, and the message is clear: only collective informed decisions can save us now. It is a tiresome trope, but I write it anyway: this book, really, should be obligatory reading for every high-school and university student. Honestly, human civilization depends on it."
Renowned activist Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? comments that: "The climate movement is not leader-less, but leader-full – and increasingly the leadership is coming from frontline and Indigenous communities. It's very good to have the latest social science research brought to bear as well, and this book supplies it! We need all the good thinking we can get if we're going to make progress fast."