Paul Bierman is a Professor of Environmental Science and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont and a faculty fellow at the Gund Institute for Environment.

Engaging students in the principals of physics, chemistry, and biology that underlie environmental science can be a challenge, especially in large and introductory classes, which I frequently teach. Over more than three decades as an educator at the college and high school level, I have honed an approach that I find reaches and engages many students in these large, lecture-based classes—teaching about the environment through the lens of people, their lives, and out-of-the-box ideas. 

Black-and-white Big Bug movies 

Teaching with science-fiction movies made before most students (and many faculty) were born is particularly useful for engaging students when considering the cryosphere and biosphere—important topics for geographers, geoscientists, and anyone teaching environmental science in this era of rapid global warming. I find the movies are engaging because they are simple and cheesy, and they present a disarming reality of a world alien to college students in the 2020s. 

I often start with the engaging visual antics of 1950s Big Bug movies that include themes of climate change in the arctic (The Deadly Mantis) or atomic mutant ants in more southern climates (Them!). These black-and-white films, silly and simple as they appear today in the age of computer graphics, immediately engage students and provide rich fodder for discussion of both physical process and societal perceptions of the environment. I’ll often show a clip and then encourage the students to think about what they’ve seen and its meaning and relevance to today using think-pair-share techniques that work to engage students and personalize instruction even in 300-person lecture halls. 

Wacky ideas are great fodder for teaching science 

Science and scientists have had no shortage of ideas. But the Cold War, which pitted the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and eastern bloc countries between the 1950s and 1970s, was particularly rich in ideas that sounded interesting but, in the end, went nowhere. Presenting these science and engineering fever dreams, and having students examine them to understand how and why they failed, brings deep engagement while keeping classes lighthearted and interesting. 

Permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that underlies much of the arctic and Antarctic, is something very few students have ever experienced, and that makes it interesting. When cold and frozen, it’s well behaved—solid enough to build on—a property that army engineers tried to emulate when they created permacrete, a man-made version of frozen soil and a mash-up of the words permafrost and concrete. First, they mixed the optimal amount of water and dry soil. Then, after allowing the mix to freeze solid, they made beams, bricks, tunnel linings, and even a chair.  

But both permafrost and permacrete have a dark side. They melt. In the summer, the upper foot or two of permafrost liquefies under the warmth of twenty-four-hour sunshine. Known as the active layer, it’s an impassable quagmire for people and vehicles.  

Today, Earth’s warming climate is melting permafrost, and presenting a series of photographs to students shows results that are hard to miss: railroad tracks warped as the soil beneath melts, hillslopes collapsing as the solid ice holding them together turns to liquid, and buildings tilting this way and that as melt undermines their foundations.  

Go ahead and ask students why permacrete never caught on as a building material. They should answer that a couple warm days would be all it would take to turn even the most robust construction project into a puddle of mud. This is a perfect segue to the most consequential, but invisible, effect of melting permafrost—the release of long-frozen carbon. That carbon, stored as organic material, ends up in the atmosphere, further warming the planet and melting more permafrost—a feedback loop destined to destabilize our climate.  

Want to engage students? Make it personal 

I find breaking down the perception that scientists are aloof and unapproachable is critical for engaging students. To do this, we need to humanize people doing science in such a way that students see themselves in the people we introduce. Learning about people who generate knowledge once required trips to libraries and faraway archives. With the internet and massive scanning campaigns by libraries and government agencies around the world, that’s changed so now students can learn for themselves about the lives of scientists. 

Take for example Henri Bader—a scientist working in the 1950s and ’60s about whom little is written, but who is central to our current understanding of ice and snow. After an evening of online sleuthing, I learned the outline of his life and his science, but even more important, I began to learn about who he was as a person—both by the choices he made and by the people with whom he worked. They were a far more diverse group than I’d ever have expected for a white male scientist born in 1907. 

Bader grew up in Switzerland and England, trained in geology with a specialty in minerals, and with his doctorate went on to study snow and avalanches in the European Alps. A few years later in 1938, he left Europe just before WWII broke out, taking a ship to Argentina where he married a Swiss woman. They spent most of the war in the Caribbean, coming to the United States just days after the war ended. The couple never had children but lived together until they both died in their nineties. 

I quickly learned that Bader defined the US military’s research program in the arctic over more than a decade, including collection and analysis of the first deep ice cores—but that was just the start. I soon learned details of his life and the lives of people around him that allowed me to identify more personally with the man. It’s exactly these discoveries that have interested students whenever I tell Bader’s story in person or in the classroom. 

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the shadow of the Holocaust, Bader mentored Jerry Wasserburg, who went on to great fame dating moon rocks. Wasserburg was Jewish and faced discrimination as a geologist. When Bader led the Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment for the army, he hired Black engineers when segregation was the norm. While the Lavender Scare permeated American government agencies in the 1950s, Bader employed lesbians to work with him as staff and editors. 

We may never know what drove the man who led American glacier science in the arctic to be so inclusive, but I’ve learned that his life story is a terrific way to engage a diverse student body and model the power and productivity of a diverse workplace. Bader can’t be unique. The more students know about the lives of scientists studying the environment, the more they will find people who break the stereotypes of scientists as we think we know them. 

I spent several years researching When the Ice Is Gone, my new environmental history book about Greenland, much of it during COVID when libraries and archives were closed. I thought tracking down the history of characters who engaged in arctic science would be difficult if not impossible. But I was wrong. Using government archives and websites that most students have access to through their libraries, including newspapers.com and ancestry.com, I learned so much more than an average online search might turn up. 

In classes of all sizes and at all levels, consider asking students to dive in to primary sources that detail the lives and passions of people critical to our current understanding of environmental science. Have them search newspapers of the past, look for passport applications, and read obituaries. They’ll discover that names on a page become people with lives that, as students, they can begin to relate to. I find the approach of teaching about the environment through the lens of people, their communities, and their out-of-the-box ideas engages students who might otherwise remain passive recipients of knowledge. 

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