Bringing climate change education into the college classroom and through the internet

Background/Question/Methods

The National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), its Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD) and the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) have collaborated since 2011 on an NSF-funded project to help prepare college and university educators to teach about climate change. The centerpiece is the Climate Adaptation and Mitigation E-Learning (CAMEL) web resource at www.CAMELclimatechange.org. The site allows easy access to more than 1000 peer-reviewed, hyper-linked encyclopedia-style articles (cross-published from NCSE’s Encyclopedia of the Earth www.eoearth.org and more than 500 curricular resources including presentations, images, lab exercises, videos, games, podcasts, and simulations. The curricular resources include learning objectives, assessment tools and teaching notes to facilitate use of the resources by other educators. The CAMEL platform enables expert review and user evaluation of content, and discussion around nearly 300 topics on climate change causes, consequences, solutions, and participation. In addition to providing educational applications of social networking tools, the platform allows educators to create public or password protected websites for use as “virtual classrooms” with customized resources, tests, and additional features. A “live cross-publishing” feature enables educators to easily incorporate content about global climate change into their own courses.

Results/Conclusions

The AIHEC/NCSE/CEDD partnership includes support of teams of faculty at Northern Arizona University (NAU) with Tohono O'odham Community College (TOCC) and at College of the Menominee Nation (CMN) with University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who have developed curricular modules the integrate Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) with western science about climate change. Outreach has included a two-semester webinar series, targeted webinars for faculty from Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) and workshops at ESA, AIHEC, CEDD and SACNAS meetings. As of February 2013, CAMEL included over 100 articles and nearly 50 teaching resources in its American Indian and Indigenous Peoples collection. These include curricular modules on Climate Change, Water and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in the Southwest developed by Octaviana Trujillo of NAU and Teresa Newberry of TOCC, Climate Statistics for Indigenous Students by Lisa Bosman and Bill Van Lopik of CMN and videos such as Where Words Touch The Earth by CMN students. Other resources include Case Studies such as: Alberta’s Oil Sands and the Rights of First Nations Peoples to Environmental Health, Podcasts including TED Talks such as Nalini Nadkarni on Conserving the Canopy and workbooks such as Northwest Tribes: Meeting the Challenge of Climate Change.