Climate Literacy Teacher Leader Fellowship Program
The Climate Literacy Teacher Leader (CLTL) Fellowship Program provides in-service preK-12 teachers with support, resources, mentorship, and training to become leaders in climate literacy education. Fellows develop tools and strategies to leverage written, visual and multimodal narratives in the classroom to empower students to understand the climate crisis and become agents of change in their lives and communities. Fellows deepen their knowledge of pedagogy and curriculum development, create climate literacy educational materials for their classrooms, provide mentorship to peers, and join a growing community of teacher leaders committed to transforming education as a system capable of supporting the transition to an ecological civilization
First Year Fellows 2026-2027
Back row (L-R): Matthew Cooper and Tim Williams.
Middle row (L-R): Kristen Rodriguez, Julie Ackerman, and Abigail Hartzell.
Front row (L-R): Sunga Kufeyani, Jing Li, Gretchen Ray-Jensen, Jade Huang, Kelsey Halverson, Kirsten Saylor, Nicole Navarro, and Daniel Villalobos.
Second Year Fellows 2026-2027
Back row (L-R): Lisa Swenson, Zhe (Andrea) Feng, Staretta Taylor-Cooper, Amanda Sell, Sofia Mulholland Cerkvenik, Shannah Anderson, Gisela Santiago, Kayla Maas, Erika Pierce, Carmen Gavin Vanegas, Kari Matthies, and Zoua Yang.
Front row (L-R): Abbie Kaufenberg, Jill Torres, Lastenia (Jen) Bates, and Xinyue (Jessie) Zong.
Year One
Year Two
Year Three
Testimonials from Fellows
Feng Zhe
This fellowship is helping me to take action. Because I teach language, I noticed that lots of language curricula are human centric. They start from “my name is...”, “who I am...”, “my family...”. Everything is about me, about people. My Fellowship project is about “can I make language curriculum more nature centric? I can start my curriculum with the sun, or, the trees, to let the students see that, as human beings, we're just a small part of the world. This program helps me actually take action. I'm making that curriculum into reality. So it's a big motivation.
—Feng Zhe, Mandarin Chinese, East View High School, Apple Valley Schools
Kayla Maas
I applied to this fellowship because my passion is deep but my knowledge was limited. I know that being a classroom teacher, I have a lot of influence on changing the future. I wanted to have the resources available to do that and also selfishly, want to protect my own children's future. I want to make sure that I'm doing my part so that my own kids have a good life ahead of them. Being able to work with other educators in this Fellowship who are also inspired by this work is huge.
—Kayla Maas, Seventh Grade Language Arts, Cass Lake Middle School, Cass Lake Public Schools
