• Emotions: Student responses after learning about the complexity of the problem (e.g. overwhelm, withdrawal, anxiety), and maladaptive coping strategies.
• Disempowerment: Many courses are more heavily focused on problems than solutions. Students often mention feeling that the ‘don’t know what to do.’
• Narrow views of possible action: In terms of options for acting on climate change, educators sometimes struggle to instil the breadth of possible actions students can pursue (spanning any scale, context, dimension of life, and encompassing climate change adaptation as well as mitigation)

• Strengths-based: it supports students to explore their personal strengths and how these can be drawn upon.
• Holistic: it supports multidisciplinary understandings of climate change and how it relates to social, natural, cultural, human, financial, built and political domains.
• Action-focused: it is designed to empower students to consider actions they can take at various scales and in various contexts – spanning the minor/everyday, the radical/transformative action, and medium-scale actions e.g. initiatives/projects with peers/friends/ family or within the workplace across a wide range of careers.

This section of the resource provides can be used in any lecture/tutorial to introduce students to the Climate Superpowers website and framework, including a link to the 3 minute introductory video and the quiz.

This activity, delivered by Dr Helena Bender and Jasmine Rhodes as part of a multi-disciplinary subject called Sustainability: Hope for the Earth?, students think about their skills and how they can apply their learning in action, to assist to build a sense of agency and hope.

In the 40 minute activity, students:

1. completed the Climate Superpowers quiz
2. got into groups of about 3 students who shared the same dominant superpower (e.g. a ‘social superpowers’ group, and ‘built superpowers’ group, etc.)
3. considered a future scenario, and answered questions on a Padlet board about how they might apply their climate superpowers
4. regrouped for class discussion, to explore the responses from the different superpower groups and reflect on how the superpowers could build upon each other

For more details, download the activity resource. You can also watch Helena speak about this activity in the symposium recording at the bottom of this page.

This 30 minute activity, designed by Jasmine Rhodes, was delivered in the final week of semester of the first-year multi-disciplinary subject Introduction to Climate Change.

The aim was to help students identify actions they can take using their unique climate superpower, at various scales (individual, inner circle and community), and addressing both climate change mitigation and adaptation.

1. Tutor ran through a reflection activity exploring how hopeful students feel about climate change, at the end of the subject, and students reflected on a core value that they would like to focus on in their efforts to respond to climate change.
2. Student took the Climate Superpowers quiz.
3. Students individually completed the ‘Scaling Superpowers Worksheet’, noting actions they could take that would A) draw upon their strongest superpowers and B) align with a value they hold.

For more details, download the activity resource. You can also watch Jasmine speak about this activity in the symposium recording at the bottom of this page.

In this activity, designed by Dr Wendy Walls for the subject Landscape Studio: Designed Ecologies, students incorporated one or more of the Climate Superpowers into their design for a parkland site.

1. Students were given a scenario of the year 2070 where Melbourne city has grown, the climate has changed, and this has added pressure to open park spaces. Their task in this subject was to create a landscape design for a site.
2. Students took the Climate Superpowers quiz in class. They were encouraged to reflect upon how they could use their superpowers, and also how the seven superpowers – social, natural, built, human, cultural, political and financial – represent different lenses which can shape a landscape architecture design.
3. In their reflective design journals, students then chose a few of the superpowers and explored how framing their design task with a focus on those superpowers would shape their design for the parkland site.
   • For example, some students took a social framing to their scenario, and this allowed them to make decisions about the future park size and shape that were different to an economic or natural framing.
4. Students then selected one superpower to focus on in framing their design for the parkland site.

For more details, download the activity resource. You can also watch Wendy speak about this activity in the symposium recording at the bottom of this page.

Some other activity ideas that educators at universities have considered applying include:

Spiralling up

Activities could be designed to encourage students to explore ways that they could draw on their existing superpowers to further develop other superpowers (either as individuals or collectively) – an idea sometimes called ‘spiralling up’.

‘Climate Superpowers profiles’

Students could be encouraged to learn about figures in their field of study that possess certain superpowers – e.g. a doctor who uses their social superpowers to raise awareness in the media around the health impacts of climate change, or an architect who uses their cultural superpowers (creative skills and knowledge of local spirituality and culture) in their sustainable designs. Educators could provide information to students about such figures and/or task students with finding their own examples.

Framing readings or assignments

Educators could provide readings with theory/research/examples that relate to how each of the 7 superpowers can be used to address climate change in the context of the subject/discipline of study. Similarly, students could be set an assignment where they choose one (or more) of the superpowers, find relevant literature and write about its relevance to the topic of study.

Activities piloted in school classrooms

Some of the activity resources included in the school-level Climate Superpowers classroom resources may also be of interest. These include activities such as bingo, short video competitions, and development of a class action plan.

Climate Superpowers in the Classroom: The Climate Superpowers website was created with and for young people in 2022. It invites young people to take a quiz to find out about their ‘climate superpowers’ – social, natural, built, political, human, cultural and financial – and then to explore ways of using these for learning about climate change, taking action, and self-care.

Since the website launched, educators, young people and researchers have been working together to apply the climate superpowers approach within classrooms at school and university levels.

The symposium features presentations from three educators who piloted ‘climate superpowers’ classroom activities across three subjects at the University of Melbourne in 2023:

• Introduction to Climate Change
• Sustainability: Hope for the Earth?
• Landscape Studio: Designed Ecologies.

You can find out more about these activities at the top of this webpage, or by downloading the activity resource.

Sustainable Self module: Launched in March 2024, The Sustainable Self is a set of interactive learning modules that promote wellbeing and adaptive coping for those studying emotionally challenging topics at the University of Melbourne, such as climate change and social inequity. The module includes six sections through which students can work on building their ‘sustainable self’.

Wattle Fellowship program: The Wattle Fellowship is the University of Melbourne’s co-curricula program for students to foster leadership on global sustainability, focusing on multidisciplinary approaches, transformative leadership and practical skills development. This year-long program supports students in bringing ideas to life, creating positive impact, and developing within a community of change-makers.

Phoebe Quinn: Phoebe is a Research Fellow in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, where she conducts research and develops resources with the aim of community wellbeing in the face of climate change and disasters. She co-leads the Climate Superpowers body of work. Phoebe also explores democratic innovations and digital technology in relation to climate change and disasters through her doctoral research.

Wendy Walls: Wendy is a landscape architect researcher, writer and educator. She is a lecturer in the Melbourne School of Design currently teaching into the Bachelor of Design and Landscape Architecture masters program. Her research focuses on landscape design methods and practice under threat of climate change. This includes the role of landscape architecture in designing for the lived experience of heating cities.

Jasmine Rhodes: Jasmine is a lecturer and tutor in the University of Melbourne Faculties of Education and Science, teaching subjects in philosophy of environmental education, interdisciplinary sustainability and climate studies, and environmental social psychology. She recently co-developed the Sustainable Self modules for students studying emotionally challenging subjects at the University.

Dr Helena Bender: Helena is an interdisciplinary education specialist who brings her secondary school teaching experiences to her coordination and teaching of UNIB10024 Subject Sustainability: Hope for the Earth?, the ‘Fire, people and sustainability investigation’ in SCIE10005 Today’s Science, Tomorrow’s World, and to her contributions to ENST90043 Sustainable Landscapes. She is passionate about facilitating sustainability and seeks to empower students to create a future in which the planet and its inhabitants can all thrive.

Matt Dunne: Matt Dunne is the Program Manager for the Wattle Fellowship, where he galvanises developing leaders and helps them develop into leaders in global sustainability. He has an extensive background in education and co-curricular programming across a diverse range of schools, universities and professional development contexts around Australia and the world. Matt is also an accomplished artist and owns and operates a publishing company.

Dr Rebecca Patrick: Dr Rebecca Patrick is a teaching and research academic who is recognised for her expertise in nature, environment, and health research and scholarship. She trained in health promotion, practised in youth and community health for over 10 years and is an accomplished interdisciplinary researcher, leading multi-institution, mixed-methods research in climate-related mental wellbeing and health co-benefit intervention measurement and evaluation.