CYCLES: TEACHERS DISCOVERING CLIMATE CHANGE FROM A NATIVE PERSPECTIVE

CYCLES is a three year teacher professional development (PD) program for secondary science teachers who teach at schools with a high enrollment of Native American students. The program was developed to deepen the teachers' understandings of the science of Climate Change (CC) through a focus on (1) climate literacy and core concepts, (2) place- based learning, (3) scientific inquiry, and (4) culturally responsive teaching. CYCLES reflects the similarities between Native American and scientific explanations of the natural world as interconnected processes that are cyclical. The thematic content for CYCLES focused on the five elements of the medicine wheel—Earth, Fire, Air, Water, and Life.

The CYCLES project involves 20 teachers from the Fond du Lac, Leech Lake, Red Lake, and White Earth reservations in Minnesota over a three-year period. During the first summer (2011), teachers attended a week-long workshop with five follow-up professional development days and classroom support planned for the following academic year. The content for the workshop was selected based on core concepts from climate literacy standards and the medicine wheel approach to understanding the world taken from native philosophy. We also provided strategies for developing programs with Native communities and involving tribal elders and scientists, as well as specific examples of culturally-relevant climate change education.

A formative evaluation study was designed to provide evidence of the impact of the program. The evaluation study focuses on three aspects of teacher learning; (1) belief and attitude changes about climate change, (2) improvement of conceptual knowledge of climate change, and (3) perception change and pedagogical practices of culturally responsive teaching for climate change. In this presentation we will discuss how native philosophy and culturally relevant pedagogy were integrated in our program and share our experience from the first year PD and findings from the evaluation study. This presentation is relevant to GSA members interested in promoting climate change education in both inservice and preservice teacher education programs.