Meeting the climate challenge: a climate mural by and for students

The performance offers a very nice introduction. It enables students to direct their own knowledge while dealing with concrete and, above all, complex issues

Doing more and better together to understand and take action against global warming is precisely the will expressed by PSL students in a survey conducted in the winter of 2021 by the REFEDD (French Student Network for Sustainable Development). Hearing this call and sharing this remark, all of PSL's schools have joined forces under the common banner "PSL Anthropocene" and offer a series of lectures and events at the beginning of the 2021 academic year to kick off the training and actions supporting sustainable development at PSL.
On September 25, as part of the "Beginning of the 2021 academic year: PSL Anthropocene", second-year students in the Sustainability Sciences (Bachelor's of Science for a Sustainable World) led a "climate mural" workshop for their new first-year classmates (CPES Multidisciplinary Undergraduate degree and Sustainability Sciences track).

This collaborative workshop, based on 42 maps from the IPCC's work is a tool for raising awareness on climate issues and it is widely used on university campuses. As a result, since 2018, over 60,000 students on campuses have been trained.

Based on this experience, as well as on the workshops organized in 2019 and 2020 for students in the ESPCI Paris - PSL and Mines Paris - PSL engineering schools, the teaching team of the CPES and Sustainability Sciences bachelor's degrees decided to make it part of the beginning of the year.
"The climate mural is an interesting teaching tool. This year, PSL joined the "Climate Mural" organized for the past few years by the "Fresque du climat" NGO. The performance offers a very nice introduction. It enables students to direct their own knowledge while dealing with concrete and, above all, complex issues. It is also a very good way to grasp the cross-disciplinary nature of climate issues and the need to imagine multidisciplinary responses. And it enables us to prepare them for the multidisciplinary teaching cycle that will begin in the second semester," explains Nicolas Delaffon, who is in charge of interdisciplinary projects in the Sustainability Sciences degree program.

At the beginning of the academic year, this event was also an opportunity to bring students together. Divided into twenty-six groups of five persons, they debated, discussed and confronted their point of views to create their mural with the help of second-year students from the Sustainability Sciences program, who became "muralists" for the occasion.

Starting with a common package (42 cards, a set of pencils, some data sheets...), each of the twenty-six murals created that day was unique. Some highlighted the need to convince people of the reality of climate change, others pointed out the climate emergency and the responsibility of everyone, and still others tried to represent as faithfully as possible the causal chains of the ongoing climate change.

Once completed, each of the murals gave rise to a debate within the group. "The discussion with the first-year students was a great moment. It enabled us to communicate our mutual commitments and, above all, to imagine how to unite our different commitments. As in any debate, we didn't all agree," said Anaïs, a second-year student in the Sustainability Sciences program who was trained in June 2020 to lead the workshop.

For Anaïs, as for the other muralists, it was a first experience. It enabled them to practice public speaking, debate facilitation, and active listening, all skills acquired and developed throughout their training. They also benefitted from the support and advice of the "Fresque du climat" NGO, some of whose representatives came for the occasion.
Next fall, first-year students will also be trained to become muralists. They will in turn lead Climate Mural workshops for new PSL students.

The climate mural workshop, by Rozenn and Alexandre, PSL student ambassadors