SUSTAINABILITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE TEACHING RESOURCES

Climate and sustainability topics are intertwined, both in terms of the concepts within them and the pedagogies for teaching them. Teaching these topics requires a broad understanding of the Earth system and benefits from active learning strategies to allow students to become engaged in these complex and potentially controversial subjects. The sustainability and the climate change site guides offer organized, centrally-located access to teaching activities, course descriptions, program and curriculum information, faculty reflection essays, and pedagogies to support teaching these topics.

The On the Cutting Edge, Interdisciplinary Teaching of Geoscience for a Sustainable Future (InTeGrate), and the Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) projects held six workshops in 2012 that resulted in new resources focused on sustainability and incorporating climate literacy into the classroom. The breadth of topics are adaptable and adoptable to an array of courses and programs, not limited to the geosciences. An On the Cutting Edge and the American Quaternary Association workshop produced activities on climate change using Great Lakes trends, lake sediment core, and geomorphic data. The Environmental Geology workshop from On the Cutting Edge brainstormed the effects of population growth on specific natural resources, resulting in reflections useful to spur discussion and formulate activity ideas. Participants also submitted and reviewed teaching activities, many involving sustainability and climate. Two InTeGrate workshops provided a rich set of activities, course descriptions, and essays addressing teaching sustainability, climate literacy, systems thinking, and scaling-up local observations to global issues. Two online CLEAN workshops tackled strategies for addressing climate misconceptions in the classroom and produced a sequence of activities that can be used to teach climate literacy based on the common elements in the existing CLEAN reviewed collection.

These collections, and opportunities to be involved in workshops, webinars, and web authoring, are available through the sustainability (http://serc.carleton.edu/teachearth/site_guides/sustainability.html) and the climate change site guides (http://serc.carleton.edu/teachearth/site_guides/climate.html).