Southampton High School Teacher Attends MacArthur Foundation Institute on Climate and Equity in Acadia

At Southampton High School, most students will graduate without having taken Jennifer Keller’s college-level courses — and without having the opportunity to look at “some of the biggest issues that our world is facing,” she said.

That is because she is the district’s only environmental science teacher.

This is not a phenomenon unique to the East End, Keller pointed out, and over the summer she connected with 11 like-minded instructors from across the nation, who were selected from a pool of nearly 90 applicants for the MacArthur Foundation Institute on Climate and Equity at the Schoodic Institute in Acadia National Park on the coast of Maine.

“Oh my God, I was just, like, delirious,” she said of being accepted. “I was, like, ‘We did it!’ And yet, at the same time, I felt pretty confident going in, because there was a lot of alignment between my work and what they were hoping to bring together.”

While her Southampton classes often examine the intersectionality of climate change and climate justice, Keller also recently earned her doctorate from Antioch University, where her dissertation investigated the impact of forest bathing on adolescent well-being and connection to nature.

Her students helped her with her research, she said, and at a time when teen anxiety and depression were “going through the roof,” they ultimately saw a beneficial outcome.

“Spending time in nature is a way for people to get more connected to nature, to have more care and concern for nature,” she said, “so there’s a huge body of literature that shows that when young people are outside in nature, it increases their ability to focus, but it also relieves their eco-anxiety or eco-grief.”

During the first day of the institute, which met from July 29 to August 5, Keller presented her findings to her contemporaries, who also taught climate equity lessons of their own. Ranging from their 20s to 60s, the teachers hailed from rural, suburban and urban communities spanning from Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest to the South, Midwest, and Northeast.

“I’ll tell you, these teachers, we all just blew each other away,” she said. “So many of us are doing very meaningful work related to climate and it was great to be in a space where there were other courageous teachers who really did not shy away from these really critical issues. We were able to have incredibly meaningful conversations.”

Throughout the week, with help from guest speakers and some of last year’s fellows, they explored key aspects of climate and justice, how they manifest in each of their communities, their teaching practices, and how they’re talking with their students about the inheritance of global warming — helping them channel their feelings of grief, anger and rage.

“My whole take, based on my research, is that we really need to be connecting our students to intact ecosystems,” Keller said. “So I presented on my research and how getting young people out in nature can alleviate their eco-grief and eco-anxiety and give them the resilience they need to take action toward a more sustainable future.”

The same rings true for the teachers themselves, who all combat “very intense emotions” as climate educators, Keller said. Together, they explored Acadia National Park in their free time, bonding over the isolation that can come with the role and soaking in the camaraderie that they shared.

It was needed, she said, whether they were walking through the forest or down to the shore, sitting by the water and listening to the birds.

“The space that they gave us to connect with nature and restore ourselves and heal ourselves was very important,” she said, “but also the way that we had that free time for spontaneous conversations, which really led to a lot of us committing to working together.”

Since the summer, the fellowship has only continued and the teachers regularly meet on Zoom to discuss current and future endeavors, Keller said.

“Several of us have a project that we’re working on trans-continentally, where we’re looking at nature in all our different locations and then we’re looking at climate change and then the students are communicating with us, all the way from Hawaii, across the U.S., and all the way up to Maine,” Keller said. “So it’s an amazing connection that we made for ourselves as teachers, but also our students, as well.”

This year’s fellowship will culminate at next summer’s institute, where they will present to the new group of fellows and, once again, connect with one another while convening in nature. But what will stay with Keller, and inside her classroom, is the validation that her work matters — and the courage to keep teaching it.

By the end of November, which is National Native American Heritage Month, Keller will conduct a class reading of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” a book by Potawatomi professor Robin Wall Kimmerer, who explores relationships between humans and land, with a focus on the role of plants and botany in both Native American and Western traditions.

“In the past, I might not have really pushed as much, in terms of the legacy of colonialism and how so much of our environmental damage, planet-wise and definitely in North America, is related to a legacy of colonial exploitation and land theft,” she said. “Really being able to highlight that for my students, that this is a very intersectional problem and feeling comfortable having those conversations with my students, is important.”

As the only environmental science teacher in the district, Keller is raising questions over what it would take to embed these themes in other classes across all grades.

“It can’t fall to just the environmental science teachers. It takes all of us, just like it takes all the beings in the forest to make a forest,” she said. “A tree doesn’t make a forest. We all need to be focusing on our students’ well-being related to these issues that are very, very much at the forefront of their minds. They know what’s happening to the planet and they feel very strongly about it. They care very deeply.”