Pedagogy of Care: Exploring Climate Justice Frameworks in CUNY Undergraduate Courses

Project Background

Climate justice centers the human rights of communities most impacted by the climate crisis rather than solely focusing on the scientific aspects of environmental challenges and disasters.¹ Higher education institutions play a key role in advancing climate justice education, but research shows that frameworks are not consistently defined across institutions. This IRB-approved study sought to explore how climate justice frameworks are implemented at the CUNY undergraduate level and learn more about the instructors delivering these courses. From February to April 2026, instructors from different CUNY undergraduate campuses were surveyed, interviewed, and asked to share their course syllabi in an effort to identify patterns and themes across their pedagogical approaches.

Research Questions

• What constitutes a climate justice-related course at the CUNY undergraduate level?
• How, if at all, are climate justice topics integrated into undergraduate courses across CUNY?
• What are the successful components of climate justice frameworks used in CUNY undergraduate courses?
• What are the challenges faced by instructors delivering climate justice-related courses at CUNY undergraduate colleges?
• What is the demographic makeup of the instructors delivering climate justice-related undergraduate courses at CUNY?

Data Sources

Key Findings

Chart/Table 1: The majority of participating instructors (9/12) reported identifying as White European or White Eastern European on the survey. Click here to toggle.

Chart/Table 2: 8 out of 12 instructors reported teaching at CUNY for over 7 years on the survey. Click here to toggle.

Chart/Table 3: Participating instructors are mostly affiliated with their campuses' social science departments. Only one instructor was from a physical/natural science department. Click here to toggle.

Chart/Table 4: The terms in this chart appeared the most in John Jay's syllabi (perhaps due to their higher number of syllabi and more explicit climate justice frameworks). However, all courses integrated at least some climate justice topics/materials, even if not as explicitly. Click here to toggle.

Interactive Theme Network

While instructors shared varied perspectives on how they personally view climate justice and how they integrate climate justice-related topics into their courses, they intersected in a few key areas. Overall, instructors focused on climate justice within an urban context, helping their students (largely New York City residents) make the connection between pressing environmental issues and sociopolitical disparities through their own lived experiences. They also expressed a heavy emphasis on honing their students' understanding of the basics of climate science before delving into policy or case studies. Most instructors focused on climate-related policies at the city, state, federal, or global level, helping students understand how to potentially engage with the public policy cycle. The theme network explores these key takeaways further through a hierarchy of "parent" and "child" themes that emerged through an iterative process of qualitative coding.

Hover over any node to see full theme names. Scroll up/down to zoom, and click-drag to manually navigate around the network. Click nodes to expand hierarchy levels, use the side panel table to review full hierarchy entries, and note that child nodes with subchildren are shown in green.

GitHub Repository

The GitHub repository for this project can be found here.

Contact

Principal Investigator: Ismerlyn Gonzalez

Email: ismerlyn101@gmail.com

Affiliation: M.S. Program in Data Analysis and Visualization, CUNY Graduate Center