ADAPTING K-12 CLIMATE CHANGE LAB ACTIVITIES TO ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

The COVID-19 crisis presents the informal education community with an unprecedented opportunity to develop robust and effective educational materials in support of K-12 educators across the country. Museums and informal education venues nationally are responding to the

COVID-19 pandemic with a large-scale effort to digitize our educational resources and make them available on-line. While we normally rely on families and teachers to engage with our resources on-site, we are now confronted with the need to turn this equation around and meet our communities not where we are, but wherever they are. The rapid push to develop distance learning resources has just as suddenly highlighted the gaping disparities to digital access – particularly in rural and low-income communities.

In 2017 PRI published The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change. This was followed by a series of teacher workshops in climate science that focus on active learning for K-12 students. Activities address topics across the science curriculum and promote the interdisciplinary approaches of critical zone science. A core component of these workshops is the development of hands-on experiments for use in the classroom that employ low-cost and readily accessible materials in order to facilitate widespread adoption.

As we are confronted with nationwide school closings our hands-on activities are being adapted to the needs of hands-off education. The activities follow the outline of the Teacher-Friendly Guide, consisting of topical units comprised of a video “experiment” conducted by a PRI educator and written materials for both students and teachers. Students can watch the experiment and work with the data generated in order to gain first-hand experience with the phenomena under investigation.

Concurrent with this effort we are tracking the usage of our resources to better understand and serve the needs of our community. At the same time, by working to re-design our activities to be smart-phone friendly and available in mixed media formats, we are working to address the much larger problem of digital access inequality.