SYSTEMIC METHODS FOR TEACHING AND COMMUNICATING CLIMATE CHANGE: NEW PEDAGOGICAL TOOLS FOR SCIENTISTS AND EDUCATORS

Educating the public about the causes and consequences of accelerating climate change is a challenging task needed for informed societal response including policy change. The interrelationships and feedbacks within the climate system, and the effects of anthropogenic activities on Earth system processes, need to be communicated using tools that maximize engagement and retention – we need systemic methods to enable the scientific and education communities to help students and the public build the knowledge necessary to comprehend the nature of historical and anthropogenic climate change, visualize the interconnectedness of Earth system processes, and understand the context for, and relevance of, climate data and research.

To this end, the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) has developed a framework for Understanding Global Change (UGC) that consists of a coherent schema for organizing educational resources and conceptual models to facilitate learning about climate and related global change. The UGC system models are portrayed using iconography on an Earth scene that depicts the essential components of the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere, with arrows used to represent relationships and feedbacks between the Earth system components. This schema is thus explicit about the relationships between the relevant scientific content and provides a mechanism for developing the type of pedagogic narrative that is known to support comprehension and retention of information and relationships. Thus, the UGC iconography and models are visual learning scaffolds for establishing instructional learning progressions for teachers, students, and the public.

Although educational resources explaining components of the climate system exist, this content is seldom connected causally and explicitly to the physical, chemical, and biological processes embedded throughout K-12 science content. Anthropogenic climate change is often presented as an isolated topic or curricular unit without historical or Earth systems context. Using the UGC framework and models, we are working with scientists and formal and informal educators to guide the integration of climate and global change content and system models into coherent learning experiences for K-12 and the public.