ED23A-0958
The Davis Junior High Global Warming Project and Bike/Walk to School Challenge
Junior high school students in Davis, CA, were targeted in an outreach project combining interactive and hands- on information about global warming and carbon footprints with a bike/walk to school challenge. The project was conducted by the Kearney Foundation of Soil Science, the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources and the John Muir Institute of the Environment at the University of California Davis. Approximately 70 undergraduates, graduate students, post-doc researchers, faculty and staff from UCD and the town of Davis were involved. Workshops were held in the 7th, 8th and 9th grade science classes in Davis' 3 junior high schools, reaching a total of 1700 students. Each 50-minute presentation consisted of a Global Warming Jeopardy game, followed by individual calculation of carbon footprints oriented towards a junior high school student. Biking or walking to school, instead commuting by car, was introduced as an important and feasible activity that could reduce one's carbon footprint. Working with staff from each junior high, students were then challenged to increase biking or walking to school during a 2 week Bike/Walk to School Challenge . UCD students and staff monitored automobile commuting (# cars, idle time) and bike use during this time and provided incentives for biking or walking . All schools were recognized for efforts to reduce their carbon footprints, and the concept was reinforced at the start of the following school year by planting a tree at each school.
ED23A-0959
Teaching Climate Change Through Music
During 2006, Peter Weiss aka "The Singing Scientist" performed many music assemblies for elementary schools (K-5) in Santa Cruz County, California, USA. These assemblies were an opportunity for him to mix a discussion of climate change with rock n' roll. In one song called "Greenhouse Glasses", Peter and his band the "Earth Rangers" wear over-sized clown glasses with "molecules" hanging off them (made with Styrofoam balls and pipe cleaners). Each molecule is the real molecular structure of a greenhouse gas, and the song explains how when the wearer of these glasses looks up in the sky, he/she can see the "greenhouse gases floating by." "I've seen more of them this year than the last / ‘Cuz fossil fuels are burning fast / I wish everyone could see through these frames / Then maybe we could prevent climate change" Students sing, dance and get a visual picture of something that is invisible, yet is part of a very real problem. This performance description is used as an example of an educational style that can reach a wide audience and provide a framework for the audience as learners to assimilate future information on climate change. The hypothesis is that complex socio-environmental issues like climate change that must be taught in order to achieve sustainability are best done so through alternative mediums like music. Students develop awareness which leads to knowledge about chemistry, physics, and biology. These kinds of experiences which connect science learning to fun activities and community building are seriously lacking in primary and secondary schools and are a big reason why science illiteracy is a current social problem. Science education is also paired with community awareness (including the local plant/animal community) and cooperation. The Singing Scientist attempts to create a culture where it is cool to care about the environment. Students end up gardening in school gardens together and think about their "ecological footprint". http://www.peterweissmusic.com
ED23A-0960
The American Meteorological Society Education Program Model for Climate Science Education
A guiding principle of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Education Program is that public scientific literacy is most effectively achieved through systemic change in the classroom. The AMS, partnering with NOAA, NSF, NASA, the US Navy, and SUNY Brockport, aims for greater public scientific literacy through its successful distance learning programs that convey to pre-college teachers and undergraduates the fundamentals of meteorology, oceanography, and hydrology. The AMS DataStreme teacher-enhancement courses (Atmosphere, Water in the Earth System, and Ocean) have changed the way thousands of pre-college teachers teach and hundreds of thousands of students learn. Furthermore, teachers trained in this program are positioned to contribute to local and statewide curriculum reform. The AMS Online Weather Studies and Online Ocean Studies courses are providing tens of thousands of college undergraduates with engaging and highly motivational learning experiences. DataStreme courses are offered locally and feature mentoring of teacher participants whereas Online undergraduate courses are licensed by AMS for offering by colleges and universities. Integrated components of the AMS model are course website, investigations manual, and customized textbook. A portion of twice-weekly investigations is written to a near real-time situation and posted on the course website. Through its extensive experience with the DataStreme/Online programs, the AMS Education Program is now uniquely poised to assume a national leadership role in climate education by applying its proven teaching/learning model to climate education at the pre-college and undergraduate levels. The AMS model is ideally suited for delivering to teachers and students nationwide the basic understandings and enduring ideas of climate science and the role of the individual and society in climate variability and change. The AMS teaching/learning model incorporates an Earth system perspective, is problem focused, and utilizes the stream of near-real time geophysical data available on the Internet. With this model students and teachers access the resources needed to tackle scientifically authentic real-world issues (e.g., modeling and measuring climate, sea level rise and its consequences, limitations on carbon emissions, sustainability, societal resilience, lessons of the climate record) in investigations that help develop their analytical and critical thinking skills. Application of the AMS model to climatology promises to improve climate science literacy and popular perception of contemporary climate research. http://www.ametsoc.org/amsedu/
ED23A-0961
Climate Discovery: NCAR Online Education Climate and Global Change Professional Development Program
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is offering middle and high school teachers an opportunity to learn about the science of climate and how current research is advancing our understanding through Climate Discovery, a series of three online professional development courses. The goals of the Climate Discovery online course series are to provide climate science content relevant to National Science Education Standards, to share easy to implement, hands-on classroom activities that facilitate student understanding of climate and global change, and to provide a broad overview of Earth system science to educator-leaders who are teaching sciences at the middle and high school levels. The first course in the series, Introduction to Earth's Climate, explores climate science and serves as the introduction to the Climate Discovery series. The second course, Earth System Science: A Climate Change Perspective, explores Earth as a system from the perspective of climate and global change, describing the interactions between the various parts of the Earth system, and how they all affect our climate. The final course, Understanding Climate Change Today, provides an opportunity to learn about the impacts of global change as well as exploring how climate models are developed and used to understand likely scenarios of future climate and how current scientific research is improving the quality of climate predictions. The online courses, instructed by science education specialists, combine information about current research and modeling efforts with classroom-tested science inquiry activities. The online course experience features a high level of interactivity, tools for assessment, and effective community-building interactive technologies. We encourage teachers immediately apply their learning by enriching their existing standards-aligned science curriculum, bringing the science of Earth's climate to their students. In this presentation, course developers and instructors will share some of the benefits and challenges encountered during this project, as well as updating the status of current efforts and plans for the coming year. We will also share our efforts to extend this professional development model to a new online course developed to support the Bilingual Science Teachers Annual Resources Symposium (BSTARS), engaging bilingual science educators from across Colorado in a hybrid in-person/online professional development experience.
ED23A-0962
The GLOBE Carbon Project: Integrating the Science of Carbon Cycling and Climate Change into K-12 Classrooms.
The global carbon cycle is a key regulator of the Earth's climate and is central to the normal function of ecological systems. Because rising atmospheric CO2 is the principal cause of climate change, understanding how ecosystems cycle and store carbon has become an extremely important issue. In recent years, the growing importance of the carbon cycle has brought it to the forefront of both science and environmental policy. The need for better scientific understanding has led to establishment of numerous research programs, such as the North American Carbon Program (NACP), which seeks to understand controls on carbon cycling under present and future conditions. Parallel efforts are greatly needed to integrate state-of-the-art science on the carbon cycle and its importance to climate with education and outreach efforts that help prepare society to make sound decisions on energy use, carbon management and climate change adaptation. Here, we present a new effort that joins carbon cycle scientists with the International GLOBE Education program to develop carbon cycle activities for K-12 classrooms. The GLOBE Carbon Cycle project is focused on bringing cutting edge research and research techniques in the field of terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycling into the classroom. Students will collect data about their school field site through existing protocols of phenology, land cover and soils as well as new protocols focused on leaf traits, and ecosystem growth and change. They will also participate in classroom activities to understand carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems, these will include plant- a-plant experiments, hands-on demonstrations of various concepts, and analysis of collected data. In addition to the traditional GLOBE experience, students will have the opportunity to integrate their data with emerging and expanding technologies including global and local carbon cycle models and remote sensing toolkits. This program design will allow students to explore research questions from local to global scales with both present and future environmental conditions. http://www.globe.gov/fsl/html/templ.cgi?carboncycle&lang=en&nav=1
ED23A-0963
Teaching Historical Geology through a Climate Science Lens
As traditional Geology departments choose to reinvent themselves in light of waning interest in rocks and fossils, waxing interest in environmental, interdisciplinary issues, and advancements in pedagogy that champion inquiry and student based learning, the question begs, "What is to be done with that behemoth, historical geology?" Typically an introductory earth history course presents the timeline background to the origin and evolution of the planet Earth. At UW-Parkside, Origin and History of the Earth is taught from a climatic and dynamic equilibrium perspective using the textbook Earth's Climate Past and Future by William F. Ruddiman. The course is sectioned into 4 parts: 1) Water, Oxygen and Life on Earth, 2) Feedbacks: Greenhouse and Snowball Earth, 3) Mass Extinctions and 4) Present and Future Climate Change. While the course retains a focus upon historical dating and sampling, plate tectonics, the Milankovitch cycles and evolution, students encounter those topics as applied to solving problems reconstructing past climates, assessing the evolution of the past and future atmosphere and investigating mass extinctions. In class, small group work allows us to replace much of the standard passive lecture format with activities and outcomes congruent with a broader, environmentally cohesive picture of the planet, particularly with respect to climate change. The curriculum, activities, outcomes and assessment strategies of this new approach to an ancient class will be discussed. As an introductory course, and possible general education course, the curriculum addresses current issues of climate change to a broader audience than upper level coursework.
ED23A-0964
Engaging non-Majors: Teaching From the Eye of Hurricane Katrina and the Pacific Ocean
Engaging non-majors to become interested in the geosciences college courses they take for a science requirement represents a challenge. These courses are most likely the only exposure they will ever have to a formal earth science curriculum. Experience shows a general lack of motivation and the need to find effective teaching methods to raise their interest. In the beginning of the fall 2005 semester, I participated in a research project to measure water vapor contents on the ground of the eye of hurricane Katrina in Slidell, Louisiana. Sharing this experience with my physical and environmental geology students made a significant difference (25 percentage final grade improvement) on their interest and course performance over previous semesters. Class presentations with data collected in Katrina contributed to build a general trust in the instructor and in the way, students viewed the role of geosciences in the mitigation of natural hazardous processes. The use of travel blogs and internet enhanced courses allows teaching real time from almost anywhere as it was recently done from the east pacific (360 miles NW from Guam). An interactive portfolio of the faculty field experiences presented at the beginning of the semester has the potential to build student interest and their trust on the faculty experience and passion for the subject.
ED23A-0965
Environmental Change Science Literacy Through Writing: Successes in an Undergraduate Writing and Composition Course
Basic science literacy, especially with regards to environmental change science, is often lacking in traditional K- 12 and undergraduate education. This generally leads to broad misconceptions based on distorted presentations of science in the media. Current educational research suggests that the teaching and learning of science can happen in many ways, whether it is through lectures, labs, research, inquiry or informal learning activities. This study was motivated by the desire to investigate the ability to teach environmental change science content in the non-traditional mode of an undergraduate composition and writing course. This technique offers educators another option for the integration of climate and environmental change material into their curriculum. The study incorporates the assessment and evaluation of student writing, in-class participation and student self- evaluations from "Writing about Change: Global Environmental Change and Society" a writing course that fulfils a requirement to graduate from the University of California - Santa Cruz. The course was taught Winter Quarter 2007 with a total of 28 days of instruction and the participation of 20 undergraduate students. The overarching goals of this study can be broadly classified as attitudinal, skills development and content retention. This study was designed to address three broad questions related to the above broad goals: i) Did students leave the class more comfortable and confident with environmental change issues and content? ii) Did students develop skills that are useful for reading and writing about scientific material? iii) What did students learn (retain): more general concepts or specific facts regarding climate and environmental change? Preliminary analysis and coding of student work clearly show that students were successful in developing skills for understanding and utilizing scientific information via writing and making thoughtful judgments regarding the reliability of environmental change science in various media. More detailed analysis of student work and responses are necessary in order to fully evaluate the depth and breadth of student understanding and retention of scientific content and concepts.
ED23A-0966
Visual and Experiential Learning Opportunities through Geospatial Data
Global observation data from satellites are essential for both research and education about Earth's climate because they help convey the temporal and spatial scales inherent to the subject, which are beyond most people's experience. Experts in the development of visualizations using spatial data distinguish the process of learning through data exploration from the process of learning by absorbing a story told from beginning to end. The former requires the viewer to absorb complex spatial and temporal dynamics inherent to visualized data and therefore is a process best undertaken by those familiar with the data and processes represented. The latter requires that the viewer understand the intended presentation of concepts, so story telling can be employed to educate viewers with varying backgrounds and familiarity with a given subject. Three examples of climate science education, drawn from the current science program Science Bulletins (American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA), demonstrate the power of visualized global earth observations for climate science education. The first example seeks to explain the potential for sea level rise on a global basis. A short feature film includes the visualized, projected effects of sea level rise at local to global scales; this visualization complements laboratory and field observations of glacier retreat and paleoclimatic reconstructions based on fossilized coral reef analysis, each of which is also depicted in the film. The narrative structure keeps learners focused on discrete scientific concepts. The second example utilizes half-hourly cloud observations to demonstrate weather and climate patterns to audiences on a global basis. Here, the scientific messages are qualitatively simpler, but the viewer must deduce his own complex visual understanding of the visualized data. Finally, we present plans for distributing climate science education products via mediated public events whereby participants learn from climate and geovisualization experts working collaboratively. This last example provides an opportunity for deep exploration of patterns and processes in a live setting and makes full use of complementary talents, including computer science, internet-enabled data sharing, remote sensing image processing, and meteorology. These innovative examples from informal educators serve as powerful pedagogical models to consider for the classroom of the future. http://sciencebulletins.amnh.org
ED23A-0967
Using Planetarium Programs to Teach Climate Change
By creating engaging and entertaining fulldome immersive planetarium shows, we are able to "sneak the science in", teaching about climate change on short, long, and extremely long time scales. In our show "Force 5", we talk about the shortest times: not really climate, but weather, including hurricanes, tornadoes, and space storms. Our show "Night of the Titanic" extends the time line to include changes in ocean currents, glaciers, and icebergs on decadal time periods, associated with global warming and changes in the sun. Our show "Dinosaur Prophecy" uses four dinosaur death sites to investigate the long-term changes or events that caused their demise. And finally, in "Lucy's Cradle: the Birth of Wonder" we investigate very long-term changes that spurred human development and migration. In this paper we discuss the techniques of creating planetarium shows and the "Discovery Dome" outreach network which has grown from six sites to 30 sites in 15 states and 7 countries. If space allows, we will demonstrate the shows in a portable dome in the poster session. http://earth.rice.edu/
ED23A-0968
Introdution of China Weather TV and its work on climate change
A. Introduction of China Weather TV China Weather TV is the exclusive meteorological channel in China which broadcasting 24 hours each day. Nowadays, climate change becomes the global hot issue. As the professional meteorological channel, China Weather TV focuses on the education and public awareness on climate change. It not only makes news reports to let the public know the updates in the field of climate change, but also produces documentaries to communicate the facts, effluence of climate change as well as the policy for mitigate the change. B. Introduction of documentary series on climate change: 1) Documentary Series: Senior Expert Interview on Climate Change Content: Take the special interview of senior scientists and experts in the world, expressing their view on climate change issue. 2) Documentary Series: Resolving doubts on Climate Change Scientifically Content: Analyze the knowledge and concept of climate change, and make public know the scientific base of climate change. 3) Documentary Series: The Changing Earth Content: Shoot the natural ecosystem, such as the glacier, lake, grassland etc, showing the facts and impacts of climate change. 4 ) Documentary Series: Paleoclimate Content: Shoot the researching process and conclusion of paleoclimate scientists, making public know the historical progress of global climate. 5) Additionally, CWTV is shooting the educational program on climate change, the objective audience are students with the age from 6 to 18. http://www.weathercn.com/
ED23A-0969
Education on Climate Change and Air Quality Science in Mongolia - an ACCENT Workshop on Needs and Perspectives
This contribution reports on a recent (August 2007) workshop in Mongolia, organised jointly between the University of Berne, Switzerland and the Mongolian Development Institute in the frame of the Training and Education Task in ACCENT, the European Network of Excellence in Atmospheric Composition Change. Among the invited workshop participants were around 35 scientists from Mongolia and Europe, including many early career scientists from Mongolia and four senior scientists from European ACCENT Partner Institutions. The main objective of the Workshop was to identify the needs and perspectives of Mongolian educators and stakeholders with regard to disaster management of severe air pollution, which is especially affecting the capital of Mongolia, Ulan Bator, during wintertime. http://www.accent-network.org
ED23A-0970
New Hampshire Carbon Challenge: Reducing Residential Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
The New Hampshire Carbon Challenge is an initiative of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space at the University of New Hampshire. Our goal is to educate New Hampshire residents about climate change and also encourage them to reduce their household greenhouse gas emissions by 10,000 pounds. The Northeast region is undergoing climate changes consistent with those expected due to increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, while also contributing to climate change as the world's seventh largest source of CO2 emissions. In the USA, approximately 40 percent of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion come from residential energy consumption for space heating, electricity usage, and transportation. Homeowners typically are not aware that modest energy reductions can result in significant carbon savings. Most campaigns that raise awareness of climate change and residential energy usage disseminate information to consumers through newspaper articles, brochures, websites, or other traditional means of communication. These information-only campaigns have not been very effective in changing residential energy consumption. Bombarded with information in their daily lives, the public has become quite adept at tuning most of it out. When much of the information they receive about climate change is confusing and contradictory, residents have even less incentive to change their behavior. The Challenge is unique in that it couples accurate information about climate change with concrete actions homeowners can take to reduce their carbon emissions. Our strategy is to utilize the tools of Community Based Social Marketing, which has been shown to be effective in changing behavior, and also to leverage existing networks including the NH Department of Environmental Services, UNH Cooperative Extension, faith-based communities, municipal energy committees and Climate Project volunteers, to effectively reach residents throughout the state. The response to our program has been very positive. We gave 74 presentations to 4000 NH residents since the program was launched in October 2006. We are currently developing web-based tools tailored to New Hampshire residents that will enable them to track reductions in their energy usage and connect those reductions to reduced emissions, and will provide us feedback as to which actions households are willing to take. This type of information exchange is essential in creating and sustaining an effective and scientifically accurate public outreach campaign. http://carbonchallenge.sr.unh.edu
ED23A-0971
Informal Education and Climate Change: An Example From The Miami Science Museum
The Miami Science Museum recently took part in the National Conversation on Climate Action, held on October 4, 2007. This nationwide event encouraged members of the general public to explore local climate policy options. It provided an opportunity for citizens to discuss the issues and science of climate change with experts and policy makers, as well as neighbors and friends. During the day, the Miami Science Museum hosted a variety of events with something for everyone. Local school groups played DECIDE games and competed to find the most "treasure" in trash. Members and visitors were encouraged to leave their mark by posting comments and ideas about climate change. A "Gates of Change" exhibit provided dramatic visual indication of the effects of climate change and sea level rise. And a special "Meet the scientists" forum allowed the general public to discuss the facts and fictions of climate change with experts from Miami University's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. This activity was part of the Association of Science and Technology Centers' (ASTC) International action on Global Warming (IGLO) program. ASTC is the largest association of public science venues, and has 540 member institutions in 40 countries. http://www.miamisci.org/www/climate-action.php