When the Classroom Warms: Teaching and Learning in a Shifting Climate

A Subtle Strain No One Talks About

Sometimes, it’s not the lesson plan, the lecturer, or even the students that shape the mood of the classroom — it’s the heat that clings to the walls, the air that doesn’t move, the silence that grows heavier with each passing hour. A stillness, not of attention, but of exhaustion.

In many UK universities, classrooms were designed for another time — when the British weather was reliably cold, when ventilation meant staying warm. Those same rooms now suffocate in a different world. A world where the summers are longer, the air is warmer, and the stillness inside becomes a weight on both mind and body. This isn’t simply bad design or poor ventilation — it’s a symptom of something deeper. Climate change is no longer an abstract conversation outside the university gates. It’s entering through our windows, or rather, the windows that don’t open. It’s in the rising temperatures, the lengthening warm spells, and the growing discomfort that now lingers in learning spaces not built for this new reality.

A Deeper Discomfort, Felt but Unseen

We don’t speak often enough about how hard it becomes to teach in a warm, poorly ventilated space. How you can feel the energy drain, slowly, from both teacher and student. When the air is heavy, attention falters. Students stop interacting, not because they don’t care, but because their bodies are too busy coping.

Toilets located only on certain floors add another layer to this quiet disruption. Students leave, not out of restlessness, but necessity — and when they do, they’re gone longer than they need to be. Concentration breaks. Flow is lost. Participation thins out. These small things — the hygiene factors, as Herzberg once called them — are not small at all. They are the conditions under which everything else either thrives or fails.

The Forgotten Half of Motivation

Frederick Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory (1959) reminds us that true motivation arises not only from what inspires us — achievement, recognition, purpose — but also from what does not frustrate us (Herzberg et al., 1959). He called these the hygiene factors: working conditions, policies, interpersonal relations, and physical environment. Their absence doesn’t just lower morale; it creates active dissatisfaction.

In higher education, we often focus on the motivators: the research culture, teaching excellence, the promise of impact. Yet, what is the point of excellence if it must be delivered through heat-induced headaches, dehydration, and breathless lecture halls?

For staff, these hygiene factors shape whether a long teaching day feels fulfilling or merely endured. For students, they influence whether a classroom feels like a space to grow or simply survive. Herzberg’s theory, when viewed through the lens of academia, makes a quiet but urgent call: fix the basics, or risk losing the brilliance.

When the Basics Are the Barrier

Maslow (1943), too, placed these needs at the base of human functioning. We cannot reach for growth, esteem, or knowledge when our most essential physical needs go unmet (Maslow, 1943). And yet in higher education, we often ask students to engage, reflect, and perform in conditions that ask them first to endure. International students, especially, feel this difference. They come with expectations — of comfort, of structure, of care. They pay a premium, not just for knowledge, but for experience. When they find themselves in cramped, overheated rooms, with no quiet corner to breathe, no nearby space to regroup, they feel the disconnect deeply. Not just from the environment, but from the promise they believed in. Thinking about the staff, some of whom teach six hours a day in such spaces — standing, projecting, guiding — with little air, little to no hydration, and nowhere to retreat. This isn’t just physically tiring, it becomes emotionally and mentally depleting and it reduces the craft of teaching, to the act of surviving.

A Gentle Wake-Up Call

All of this is happening within a broader reality: universities are stretched. With financial pressures, staff restructuring, and limited capital investment, physical upgrades — air cooling for the summer, warmth for the winter — are often delayed. The buildings remain silent, but the discomfort speaks. It speaks in student disengagement. It speaks in staff fatigue.

This is not about comfort alone. It’s about respect. About acknowledging that physical space is part of the psychological contract — an unspoken agreement between the institution and its people. Students need to feel safe, seen, and supported. Academics need spaces where their expertise isn’t overshadowed by exhaustion. Perhaps now, more than ever, this moment demands attention, because the discomfort we feel in the classroom is not just institutional neglect — it is a mirror to a changing climate. A signal that our learning spaces were built for yesterday’s weather, not today’s rising temperatures. Climate change is no longer distant — it is in the air we teach in, the breathless pauses, the quiet strain in every session.

If higher education truly values its people — if it wants learning to thrive — then the basics must come first; before innovation, before AI, before ambition — there must be air, light, rest, and dignity. Because when the space holds you — even in a warming world — the mind opens, and only then does the real work begin.

References

Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., & Snyderman, B. B. (1959). The Motivation to Work. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346