Role Play: Six Americas, Six Views on Global Warming

Yale Climate Communication, Yale School of the Environment

This role-playing activity allows students to learn more about the six general ways Americans respond to climate change and engage in conversations while embodying these groups. Students will be able to describe the different ways Americans respond to climate change and develop arguments to support their claims.

Click to View

Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

It would help for students to read about the Six Americas before the start of the lesson, but this is not essential. The educator may also have students play [link https://crankyuncle.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Cranky_Teachers_Guide_v1.pdf 'the Cranky Uncle game'] first to build their skills around dealing with misinformation, or watch some of the Cranky Uncle videos ([link https://cleanet.org/resources/58422.html 'Carbon Cycle'], [link https://cleanet.org/resources/58421.html 'Past Climate Change']). The educator may want to assign roles in each student group (facilitator, time-keeper, recorder, etc) to ensure student involvement, or allow students to assign roles depending on preferences/comfort with the material. To help support diverse learners in this activity, it could be helpful to provide sentence starters for ways these students can easily enter the conversation. It could be fun for students to have time to draft their arguments and use computers to research some of what they may want to say. At the end of the discussion, it could be interesting to review the sources to make sure that the sources folks used were not giving misinformation.
This activity is focused on scientific communication and how to engage with people of different climate change perspectives. The different student roles are realistic and well-researched, with references and links provided so students can research their positions better. The resource is affiliated with Yale University, therefore is scientifically reputable and accurate. All terms and vocab are explained with links to more in-depth information. Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
The learning outcomes are clearly stated and go beyond understanding/memorizing aspects of climate change (affective domain rather than cognitive domain). There are multiple ways to organize groups depending on class size and student preferences, which lends itself to multiple scenarios to be played out. Well-organized activity with thoughtful prompts for students to think about and discuss while embodying their characters. It will likely have good engagement with students because it asks students to form an opinion and defend that opinion.