In collaboration with the libraries of Oklahoma State University (OSU) and Mount Holyoke College, the American Library Association proposes a traveling exhibit and public programs for 40 libraries examining the history and legacy of the Dust Bowl. The project spotlights Ken Burns' film "The Dust Bowl," and brings to public view two little known Dust Bowl archives: online oral history interviews of Dust Bowl survivors at OSU, and letters and essays of Caroline Henderson, a Mount Holyoke alumna who farmed in Oklahoma throughout the Dust Bowl. Libraries will display the exhibit for 6 weeks and present at least 3 public humanities programs from a list provided. The project humanities themes include the interaction between humans and nature; the different ways human beings respond to adversity; and how people living in the Dust Bowl tried to understand their social, economic, and ecological environment.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Susan Brandehoff
resourceprojectProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
Earth to Sky (ETS) is an exciting, growing partnership between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Park Service (NPS) the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), and the University of California, Berkeley. Together we work to enable and encourage informal educators to access and use relevant NASA and other science, data, and educational products in their work. The project is co-lead by NASA Earth Science Education, in partnership with NPS, USFWS and U.C. Berkeley. Earth to Sky has been funded by a series of NASA grants and the Earth Science Division of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. Mission Statement: Actively foster collaborative work between the science and interpretation/education communities of NPS, USFWS and NASA, to ultimately enrich the experiences of millions of visitors to America’s National Parks, Refuges and other protected areas. There are two, closely linked components to ETS: Professional Development, and an active Community of Practice. We use a collaborative approach to interagency professional development, bringing scientists and educators together in collegial learning environments. Our training events emphasize development of plans for use of course content in participants’ work environment. We provide face-to-face, distance-learning and blended learning opportunities. Since 2008 the effort has focused on climate change science and communication. However, we maintain connections with other science content areas, including comparative planetology and the Sun-Earth connection. We have also developed, and continue to nurture and expand, a community of practice that uses the science and communication skills and capabilities of each of the partners to enrich public engagement in natural and cultural heritage sites across the United States. Impact: 86 course participants from a total of 3 ETS courses have in turn reached well over 4 million visitors to parks and refuges with content derived from ETS professional development. Archives of almost all ETS presentations and examples of participants’ work are available to registered members of our website http://www.earthtosky.org Registration is free and open to anyone with an interest in science communication. We also maintain a listserv of nearly 500 individuals, which provides periodic updates on science, professional development opportunities and other news of relevance to the community.
This Pathways project responds to the high level of public skepticism about climate change science despite strong scientific consensus. In 2010, two George Mason University / Yale University polls became headline news in mainstream media (such as the NY Times and NPR) when they reported that 50% or more of our broadcast meteorologists and TV news directors are skeptical about global climate science. A full 30% of TV broadcast meteorologists, who are largely untrained in disciplines other than meteorology and weather forecasting, denounce anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as a hoax or a scam. Such polls strongly suggest that the general public trusts media statements over scientific facts, despite position statements acknowledging dominantly human responsibility for global warming in the past 50 years from nearly every U.S. professional society dealing with Earth sciences. Climate literacy in citizens and policy makers is essential for advancing responsible public policy on energy legislation, carbon emission reductions, and other climate change issues, and TV broadcast meteorologists have great potential for enhancing that literacy.
Gateway National Recreation Area (Gateway), a unit of the National Park Service, and Brooklyn College are creating a citizen science field observation program called "Sentinels of Shoreline Change."The project will develop collaborative learning communities around monitoring the resilience of Jamaica Bay, an urban estuary. Participants will provide scientists and resource managers with measures of the bay's resilience to human activities and climate change. The project focuses on 7-12 grade pre-service and in-service teachers, and Brooklyn College undergraduate students, while fostering collaboration between faculty, rangers and staff from the partner institutions and the general public. Gateway is responsible for managing the vast array of cultural and natural resources in Jamaica Bay for the public benefit. They have a history of teacher professional development and collaborations with formal education partners that emphasize authentic science research within the park. Brooklyn College is an urban, public liberal arts college with a diverse student population. It has competitive NCATE certified science teacher education programs; a strong collaborative working relationship between the Earth and environmental sciences and science education departments; and a history of successful place-based science education projects. Science Education for New Engagements and Civic Responsibilities (SENCER) is the funding source for this project which is subcontracted under an NSF grant.
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Brooklyn College, CUNYJennifer AdamsBrett BrancoDan Meharg
In this article, the author offers explanations for what is characterized as startling disconnect between the scientific consensus around climate change and the lack of a social consensus. The author brings attention to this disconnect by offering some explanations for what may be contributing factors to a limited public discourse on science topics such as a lack of training and/or support for scientists communicating about their research. Twelve "Rules of Engagement" are proposed in order to to begin a conversation about how scholars can effectively and appropriately communicate about their
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TEAM MEMBERS:
University of MichiganAndrew Hoffman
In December 2008, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, in partnership with the New England Aquarium and the National Aquarium in Baltimore, hosted a summit of leaders from aquariums across North America and beyond. The intent was to empower aquarium professionals to elevate their collective focus on the relationship between climate change and the ocean, and to develop collaborative strategies for communicating climate change and inspiring solution-‐oriented actions among our institutions and audiences. The summit represented the birth of a community. The three‐day event succeeded in mobilizing 34
The Climate Interpretation Coalition is maturing beyond a set of discrete institutions to become a collective voice for communicating climate change and the ocean. As the three‐year funded NOAA program and the empowerment evaluation end, the question of how to build ongoing communities of support arises. The findings are based upon an interview‐based exploration of individuals who participated in the 2012 Baltimore summit and who represent a broad spectrum of engagement (highly engaged with creating the coalition through to limited engagement in a single summit). The interviews were nested
The overarching purpose of the Climate Literacy Zoo Education Network is to develop and evaluate a new approach to climate change education that connects zoo visitors to polar animals currently endangered by climate change, leveraging the associative and affective pathways known to dominate decision-making. Utilizing a polar theme, the partnership brings together a strong multidisciplinary team that includes the Chicago Zoological Society of Brookfield, IL, leading a geographically distributed consortium of nine partners: Columbus Zoo & Aquarium, OH; Como Zoo & Conservatory, St. Paul, MN; Indianapolis Zoo, IN; Louisville Zoological Garden, KY; Oregon Zoo, Portland, OR; Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, PA; Roger Williams Park Zoo, Providence, RI; Toledo Zoological Gardens, OH, and the organization Polar Bears International. The partnership leadership includes the Learning Sciences Research Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. The partnership is joined by experts in conservation psychology and an external advisory board. The primary stakeholders are the diverse 13 million annual visitors to the nine partner zoos. Additional stakeholders include zoo docents, interpreters and educators, as well as the partnership technical team in the fields of learning innovations, technological tools, research review and education practice. The core goals of the planning phase are to a) develop and extend the strong multidisciplinary partnership, b) conduct research needed to understand the preconceptions, attitudes, beliefs, and learning modes of zoo visitors regarding climate change; and c) identify and prototype innovative learning environments and tools. Internal and external evaluations will be conducted by Facet Innovations of Seattle, WA. Activities to achieve these goals include assessments and stakeholder workshops to inventory potential resources at zoos; surveys of zoo visitors to examine demographic, socioeconomic, and technology access parameters of zoo visitors and their existing opinions; and initial development and testing of participatory, experiential activities and technological tools to facilitate learning about the complex system principles underlying the climate system. The long-term vision centers on the development of a network of U.S. zoos, in partnership with climate change domain scientists, learning scientists, conservation psychologists, and other stakeholders, serving as a sustainable infrastructure to investigate strategies designed to foster changes in public attitudes, understandings, and behavior surrounding climate change.
The purpose of this three-year collaborative design research project is to examine the role of culture in the development of knowledge and reasoning about the natural world and the subsequent sense-making of and participation in natural resource management. The PIs propose to examine the ways in which culture impacts observational habits, explanation constructing, uses and forms of evidence, and orientations towards socio-scientific challenges such as natural resource management. Collaborating on this project are researchers from the American Indian Center of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Menominee Indian Tribe of Wisconsin. The audience for this study includes the academic informal science education community and indigenous science educators. This project also offers extensive cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary research opportunities for pre- and post-doctoral research trainees. The project will employ a mixed methods approach and proposes evaluation through an advisory board and community input. A community assessment team is proposed to review activities, obtain feedback from the larger community, and identify challenges to the effective implementation of the program. The project is comprised of two main panels of studies: the first consisting of a series of investigations of learning in everyday activities and the second consisting of two community design experiments that engage two Native American communities and two non-Native communities, one rural and one urban for both communities, in a culturally based citizen science (CBCS) project focused on ecosystem disruption (e.g. invasive species; climate change) and natural resource management. The CBCS project will engage participants in question formation, data collection, data analysis, forming policy recommendations, and citizen action around the findings. This project will develop a citizen science model that effectively engages diverse communities towards productive science learning, helpful scientific data collection, and citizen engagement in community planning and local policy decisions. The researchers believe that fundamental advances in STEM teaching and learning are needed across the broad landscape of learning environments and that the success of such advances may pivot on innovations and discoveries made in informal environments. Insights obtained from prior research on learning in indigenous cultures, especially in biological and environmental sciences, combined with the anticipated results from this study could lead to a deeper understanding of cross-cultural similarities and differences in science learning.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Karen WashinawatokMegan BangDouglas MedinUniversity of Washington
The Change (working title) is a film project with supporting website and resource materials to document how climate change is impacting indigenous peoples in the most climate sensitive regions, and how anthropologists, environmental scientists, engineers, and others are working with these communities to help mitigate the effects. The documentary features Dr. Susie Crate, an NSF-funded anthropologist, and her bi-national teenage daughter Katie, whose father is from Siberia. The Viliui Sahka in Siberia, Alaska Natives in Nome, and South Pacific Islanders on Tuvalu are the communities portrayed in the film. The Change is a Full-Scale Development project produced by Ironbound Films. Outreach partners include the Center for Climate Change Communication (4C) at George Mason University, the Global Climate Adaptation Partnership (GCAP), the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), and the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals (ITEP). Ironbound Films has designed this project to build upon its successful prior documentary work, The Linguists. Deliverables include a documentary for limited theatrical release and television and Internet broadcast along with an interactive website, curriculum guide, a shorter classroom version of the film, and a robust outreach strategy in collaboration with project partners. One of the components of the outreach in conjunction with SfAA will be to create the first social networking site around climate change adaptation. Another in conjunction with GCAP is to create a series of four virtual climate change tours for Google Maps and Earth applications. SmartStart Educational Consulting Services will conduct front-end, formative, and summative evaluations. The real-life characters and communities featured in the film will illustrate how climate change is affecting people today in various parts of the world. The project gives voice to anthropologists who have been working to understand climate change as a cultural phenomenon, a perspective rarely showcased in the media. Anthropologists have expressed the need for an effective means to share this work and its results with the public. The story is based on contemporary climate science and anthropology, but features the personal perspective of the bi-national teenage daughter, and is intended to appeal to an audience not typically drawn to a climate change documentary, especially the young or underserved. An aggressive, targeted marketing and outreach campaign reflects the film's innovative approach.
Youth Volunteer Interpreters as Facilitators of Learning about Climate Change in Zoo Settings reports on a project to pilot test climate change education resources featuring youth volunteer interpreters as facilitators for zoo visitors’ experiences. Brookfield Zoo tested inquiry-based and specimen-based interpretation at the polar bear and Humboldt penguin exhibits, and Woodland Park Zoo tested a climate-change themed "activity cart" near their Sumatran tiger exhibit. Both the effects of youth volunteer interpretation on the zoo visitors and on the youth volunteer interpreters themselves were