- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 1852798
- First Name Julie
- Last Name Bianchini
- Institution University of California, Santa Barbara
- Role/Position Co-PI
- Proposal Type Workshop
- Workshop Category Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends
- Workshop Disciplines Audience STEM Education (general)
- Target Audience Noyce Master Teachers, Noyce Teaching Fellows, Undergraduate and/or Graduate Noyce Scholars
- Topics Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, STEM content and/or convergent skills development
- Additional Presenter(s)
Paul Huang (PaulKPHuang2000@hotmail.com), Brendan Ly (brendanly@ucsb.edu), and Jenna Pham (jennapham09@gmail.com)
Goals
As a result of attending this session, participants will:○Learn the importance of focusing on solutions and hope when addressing climate change with their students and develop ideas on how to do so.○Strengthen their thinking about systems and scale, and better understand the scale, complexity, and costs of the global climate change crisis.○Identify connections across climate change, climate justice, sustainability, and the curriculum they are already teaching.
Evidence
Our session is informed by research that recommends a solutions-focused, justice-centered approach to climate change education (Ramanathan et al., 2019). By focusing on solutions, teachers can support their students’ engagement in local action (Monroe et al., 2019) and ignite hope for a better future (Kelsey, 2020). Our session is also informed by research that finds teachers struggle to adequately address the topic of climate change in their instruction (Worth, 2022). The main activity proposed, a Mapping Climate Solutions activity, was inspired by the game Climate Fresk (Ringenbach, 2018), which was created to inform lay people about the findings of IPCC reports (Allen et al., 2018).References include the following: [1] Allen, M., Dube, O. P., Solecki, W., Aragón-Durand, F., Cramer, W., Humphreys, S., & Kainuma, M. (2018). Special report: Global warming of 1.5 C. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). [2] Kelsey, E. (2020). Hope matters: Why changing the way we think is critical to solving the environmental crisis. Greystone Books. [3] Monroe, M. C., Plate, R. R., Oxarart, A., Bowers, A., & Chaves, W. A. (2019). Identifying effective climate change education strategies: A systematic review of the research. Environmental Education Research, 25(6), 791-812. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2017.1360842 [4] Ramanathan, V., Aines, R., Auffhammer, M., Barth, M., Cole, J., Forman, F., Hand, H., Jacobsen, M., Pellow, D., Pezzoli, K., Press, D., Rignot, E., Samuelsen, S., Silver, W., Solomon, G., Somerville, R., Tucker, M. E., Victor, E., & Zaelke, D. (2019). Bending the curve: Climate change solutions. Regents of the University of California. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kr8p5rq [5] Ringenbach, C. (2018). Climate fresk. https://climatefresk.org/world/ [6] Worth, K. (2022). Miseducation: How climate change is taught in America. Columbia Global Reports.
Proposal
Educating students on the impacts of climate change and positioning them to take action to address the multi-layered injustices that affect marginalized communities is an act of climate justice. In this session, we will explore how to incorporate a solutions-focused, justice-centered climate change education in secondary STEM education. Participants will engage in a Mapping Climate Solutions activity: They will discuss, organize, and draw links among cards that identify causes of climate change (e.g., greenhouse gases), cards that discuss effects of climate change (e.g., more extreme storms, higher temperatures), and cards that present solutions that have been developed to address climate change (e.g., walkable cities, solar panels, reforestation). Equally important, participants will brainstorm ideas for lessons connected to issues of a changing climate and activism towards solutions: They will identify connections between the content and standards they are expected to teach, and the solutions related to climate change they can work with their students to achieve. In engaging in this Mapping Climate Solutions activity, participants will gain a clearer picture of the complexity of the climate problem; an understanding that everyone has a role to play in mitigating and preparing for the imminent climate crisis; and inspiration for how to work with their students to begin to enact justice-centered solutions.
