Climate Superpowers can support delivery of all three dimensions of the Australian Curriculum: Learning Areas, General Capabilities, Cross-curriculum Priorities.

Given its core focus on climate change, Climate Superpowers aligns closely with Sustainability, one of the three Cross Curriculum Priorities.

The Australian Curriculum website includes information about the Sustainability priority and the four sets of organising ideas within it: Systems, Futures, World views, Design. The website also highlights points of connection between Sustainability and various Learning Areas and Content Descriptors across different subjects and year levels.

As a strengths-based, action-focused and holistic way of approaching the issue of climate change, the Climate Superpowers approach can offer a range of opportunities to develop students’ General Capabilities – particularly Critical and Creative Thinking, Personal & Social Capability, and Ethical Understanding.

Below, we unpack how the Climate Superpowers website and classroom resources are intended to support the development of these capabilities. Piloting and evaluation within schools is planned for 2025 and beyond – please get in touch if you would like to discuss this.

Climate change is often thought about mostly in terms of science and the natural environment. But in reality, climate change affects and is affected by all aspects of life and society, and there are many opportunities to think outside the box – both in terms of how climate change is addressed, and how it can be integrated into learning.

The Climate Superpowers approach aims to support this holistic way of thinking about climate change, highlighting a diverse range of superpowers – social, human, political, cultural, natural, built and financial. The idea is to help students understand the role each of these superpowers can play in dealing with this issue, to support critical and creative thinking about possible strategies.

This may help teachers to identify points of climate change relevance across a wide range of topics and subjects, far beyond the direct mentions of climate or sustainability the curriculum – and provide a framework to tie that together coherently.

At more advanced levels of learning, students may explore the interconnectedness between the seven types of superpower, e.g.:

• how an action might require collaboration between people with different types of superpower – e.g. setting up a compost system as school might require collaboration between people with political, natural and built superpowers.
• how using their strongest superpower for a particular action might help them grow another type of superpower – e.g. a student might use their strong natural superpowers to help out with a veggie patch as school, and develop their social superpowers in the process by interacting with their peers and teachers.

Climate Superpowers may support development across all four elements em>Personal and Social Capability in the Australian curriculum has four elements

SELF-AWARENESS – Personal awareness, Emotional awareness, Reflective practice
By taking the quiz and reflecting on their Climate Superpowers, students can increase their Self-awareness, deepening their understanding of their strengths and interests, as well as their feelings about climate change. Activities like the Individual Climate Superpowers Action Plan (see Introductory lesson resources) can be particularly helpful in developing this capability.

SELF-MANAGEMENT – Goal setting, Emotional regulation, Perseverance and adaptability
Strengths-based and action-focused approaches are widely recognised as strategies to enable more positive experiences in thinking and talking about issues that can be emotionally challenging. This is important in the context of climate change, which can trigger difficult emotions for many young people including anger, sadness, anxiety and overwhelm.

Goal setting capabilities can be fostered by encouraging students to decide on actions they want to take using their Climate Superpowers, and perhaps even to set goals for making certain superpowers stronger.

While exploring actions that students can take, it is important to find the balance between 1) empowering students and 2) making sure they don’t take on too much of the burden in addressing this complex global issue. Some features of the Climate Superpowers resources that are intended to help with this include:

• Emphasis on the wide range of meaningful contributions that students can choose to take, with complete flexibility based on students’ motivations, strengths and circumstances.
• The Climate Superpowers framework is intended to help students see that making a difference doesn’t require them to do it all, and that addressing climate change can be achieved through the collective use of people’s different superpowers within communities.
• Inclusion of four types of action: Learning Actions, Everyday Actions and Transforming Society Actions, and Self Care actions. The Self care element emphasises how important it is for young people to pay attention to their own emotional wellbeing while engaging with this issue, and to seek support when they need it.

SOCIAL AWARENESS – Empathy, Relational awareness, Community awareness
Many of the  Introductory lesson elements involve interactions with classmates – including taking a class poll of students’ strongest superpowers based on the quiz, a small group discussion activity, and a bingo activity where the aim is to speak with someone with each of the seven different Climate Superpowers. This is intended to foster students’ Social awareness, including their appreciation of the diversity amongst their classmates.

SOCIAL MANAGEMENT – Communication, Collaboration, Leadership, Decision-making, Conflict resolution
Building on the foundations of Social awareness is laid in the Introductory lesson(s), teachers may choose to run extension activities using the Climate Superpowers lens to further foster students’ Social management capabilities. For example:

• Group projects that require collaboration amongst students (either with students with the same or different superpowers)
• Embedding references back to the Climate Superpowers framework in subsequent lessons on various topics, to foster a shared language for communication about students’ diverse strengths and interests

Climate change has been described as one of the greatest moral challenge of our time. The Climate Superpowers resources have been co-designed with young people and teachers with the aim of supporting learning, wellbeing and empowerment in relation to this issue.

Discussing actions students can take using their climate superpowers can provide a basis for exploration of ethical concepts and perspectives in relation to climate change.

Cultural superpowers are particularly relevant to this capability, since they include values and norms (which are core aspects of the Ethical Understanding General Capability).

Let’s imagine you are a teacher who already includes some exploration of ethics in relation to climate change in your teaching (or perhaps you would like to do so), and you have previously introduced students to the Climate Superpowers idea through an Introductory lesson. So, you could deliver a lesson touching on climate change and ethics (and perhaps how this is shaped by culture and values) – and you could highlight to students that in today’s lesson they will be strengthening their cultural superpowers by learning about this.

Climate Superpowers can be drawn upon in addressing many specific Learning Areas within the curriculum.

The Introductory lesson plan outlines specific links with Learning Areas at the Year 10 level in Civics and Citizenship, Geography, and Health and Physical Education.

After introducing students to the Climate Superpowers idea generally, teachers may choose to continue to embed this framework in a wide range of ways, adapting it to your context and subject matter.

You could build in references to Climate Superpowers in delivering any lesson that relates in some way to climate change. In some cases, climate change or sustainability are directly featured in the curriculum through connections to the Sustainability cross-Curriculum Priority. Beyond this, teachers may choose to address content descriptors through topics that relate to climate change. Perhaps you already do this – if so, you wouldn’t even need to create any new lessons! Consider simply highlighting to students when a particular lesson is helping them strengthen one or more of their climate superpowers – social, human, natural, cultural, built, financial and/or political.

Referring back to the Climate Superpowers framework in this way may reinforce the learnings from the Introductory lesson(s), and support students’ sense of satisfaction in their learning and development by helping them to see how they are developing their climate superpowers, and provide a shared language for discussing this. It is also likely to deepen the development of students’ General Capabilities as outlined above.

For example:

• Let’s say you were teaching a Year 9 class in Economics and Business, and your lesson addresses the content descriptor: “develop and evaluate a response to an economic and business issue, using cost-benefit analysis or criteria to decide on a course of action” (AC9HE9S04). Perhaps you are creating a new lesson plan or you already have one that focuses on renewable energy as the issue – in this case, you could flag to students that they are developing their financial climate superpowers through this learning.
• Let’s say are teaching a Year 8 music class, and you a planning a lesson to address the content elaboration: “writing songs or instrumental music to communicate ideas or opinions about themes or issues, such as their perspectives on local issues relating to sustainable ways of living or relationships such as friendship” (AC9AMU8C02). You could frame this with a focus on sustainability, and highlight to students that this exercise is helping them to grow their cultural climate superpowers.