Abstract for: Mainstreaming Climate Content into Traditional Curriculums: Using Group Model Building to identify priorities and pathways

Climate Change (CC) is an existential and cross-cutting threat to health and communities -the human impacts of CC are squarely in the domain of public health, occupational therapy and other allied professions. Yet, crucial issues of climate mitigation and adaptation are perceived to be “outside our lane” and therefore left to environmental science, engineering, etc. This is problematic, both on its face- because we’re not bringing our expertise and perspective to bear- but also strategically, as the future of our professions will be irrevocably re-shaped by CC and we need to be up to the challenge. Our overarching aim is to engage faculty and community partners in a reflection on the most effective and relevant pathways address climate action in St Louis and beyond. The team across the Brown School (BS) and Occupational Therapy (OT) are committed to ensuring that colleagues are empowered to work together to: (i) Explore opportunities and pathways for integrating efforts around education and (ii) Elaborate a method for facilitating strategic conversations within professional faculty groups. Building on conversations started in 2023, the pop-up initiative will pilot a methodology for understanding how to best create and incorporate content related to climate within courses that do not address these issues traditionally.