HR: 14:40h
AN: ED23C-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Global Climate Change and the Wildlands of Montana: Promoting Scientific Understanding for K-12 Educators
AU: * Graumlich, L J
EM: lisa@montana.edu
AF: Big Sky Institute, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717 United States
AU: Simonsen, L M
EM: simonsen@math.montana.edu
AF: Department of Mathematical Sciences, Montana State University, Bozeman, MT 59717 United States
AB: The complexities and uncertainties associated with the science of global climate change is a barrier to the implementation of global change into K-12 classrooms. This issue is part of a larger conundrum where by teachers who are not well-versed in the content of an emerging science field are less likely to incorporate that topic into their curriculum. As such, it is not surprising that the K-12 community has been slow to embrace global climate change as a curriculum element, given that science underlying global climate change is interdisciplinary and replete with new discoveries, complex models, and competing theories. Faculty members associated with the Big Sky Institute have experimented with ways to promote collaboration between researchers and educators to enhance scientific literacy. In 2004, with funding from the US Environmental Protection Agency and private foundations, we implemented a five-day, field based professional development workshop for middle and high school teachers that focused on the research underlying EPA's Climate Change, Wildlife and Wildlands curriculum. A primary objective of the overall project is to promote one-on-one engagement of teachers with researchers whose work forms the basis of the content of the curriculum. Further, we seek to assess the degree to which increased content knowledge leads to incorporation of global climate change content into classrooms and curricula. During the workshop, we focused on two broad research findings, namely: 1) Global climate change is systemically pervasive such that even wildlands (i.e., unmanaged, pristine parks and reserves) are or potentially will be altered by global climate change. 2) At the same time, natural climate variability may enhance or mask human-induced climate impacts on wildlands and wildlife. In addition, we emphasized two broadly framed "ways of thinking" about global climate change, namely: 1) Wildlands can be used to detect and measure the impacts of human-induced climate change on ecosystems because they are relatively free of other human disturbance; they are, in essence, a laboratory for climate change detection. 2) It is unlikely that future global climate change will result in a simple, uniform change in climate. Rather global climate change will result in distinctive spatial and temporal patterns of change coupled with equally distinctive patterns of species response (i.e., a fingerprint response). In this paper, we report on K-12 teachers' pre-conceptions and misconceptions regarding global climate change and wildlands and the effectiveness of the workshop in altering misconceptions. We will also report on ongoing efforts by the teachers to incorporate global climate change into their current curriculum.
DE: 1600 GLOBAL CHANGE (New category)
DE: 0805 Elementary and secondary education
DE: 0830 Teacher training
SC: Education and Human Resourcese [ED]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting