POLAR LEARNING AND RESPONDING: INNOVATIVE APPROACHES TO CLIMATE CHANGE EDUCATION (Invited Presentation)

The Polar Learning and Responding Climate Change Education Partnership (PoLAR Partnership) seeks to utilize fascination with shifting polar environments to inform public understanding of and response to climate change through the creation of innovative educational approaches geared toward adults. These approaches engage a variety of audiences in a multitude of settings. Among the tools and resources developed by the PoLAR Partnership are an Artic ecosystem card game; a marine spatial planning activity involving the role-playing of key Arctic stakeholders; a participatory game involving voicemails left from the future; a tablet-based visualization of polar region data; a radio series; and experiences that integrate local and Alaska native observations and knowledge with western science. These efforts, their evaluation highlights to date, and plans to sustain them in the future will be discussed.

A key partner in the PoLAR Partnership is the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). With four million visitors per year, AMNH is committed to raising awareness and sparking conversation about climate change through museum-based courses for lifelong learners, professional learning opportunities for educators, and other informal education programs. In addition to onsite visitors, AMNH reaches several thousand people annually through its online presence, which includes graduate courses for educators as well as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) on climate change. We will highlight the Museum’s efforts to build climate literacy among these audiences.

The richness and diversity of these approaches have informed both the PoLAR Partnership and the larger Climate Change Education Partnership (CCEP) Alliance, which is comprised of six multi-institutional projects funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition to developing new models of climate change education and engagement, the CCEP Alliance seeks to foster an improved understanding of effective practices for tailoring educational goals, objectives, content, and strategies to both audience and context. We will share some of the more recent examples among the group’s research-based findings.

The PoLAR Partnership is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number DUE-1239783.