LIVING WITH OUR CHANGING CLIMATE: PEDAGOGICAL TECHNIQUES AT THE UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL

In 2014, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Education Program published a vastly updated climate studies ebook, Our Changing Climate: An Introduction to Climate Science, adding to their educational resources inventory for undergraduate instruction. The update included significant content dedicated to the human dimension of climate change topics (e.g., human and ecosystem vulnerabilities to climate change). Our Changing Climate is intended to be used as a part of the AMS Climate Studies course. However, after examining existing undergraduate programs at a variety of undergraduate institutions, AMS discovered that climate literacy is addressed in a myriad of curricula, often in broader sustainability or geologically oriented coursework. Implementing an entire climate science course was often not practical in these programs; a more condensed exploration of the human dimensions of climate change was needed. Therefore, in 2015, the AMS Education Program created Living With Our Changing Climate, a 5-chapter ebook that addresses these disparate and mostly human-focused topics of climate literacy. This presentation will highlight the many features of Living With Our Changing Climate as well as delineate the differences between Our Changing Climate. Moreover, the presentation will offer some novel methods by which to immerse undergraduates into a more interactive engagement with topics of climate literacy. For example, the author will share best practices from a 2015 climatology course offering, where students identified and followed climate scientists immersed in social media. Further, students created infographics and digital presentations related to climate science and the AMS materials.