DEVELOPMENT OF AN OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE AIMED AT INCREASING CLIMATE LITERACY BEYOND STEM DISCIPLINES

This poster will present progress on a K-12 climate literacy project lead by Caroline Davock (STRIDE Fellow, Smith College), Julia Herzfeld (Sociology major), Bosiljka Glumac (Prof. of Geosciences), and Graeham Dodd (Director of Curriculum Design & Innovation, Campus School of Smith College), as part of Smith College’s 2019/20 Year on Climate Change initiative. The project was inspired when Prof. Glumac surveyed students in her GEO 106 Extraordinary Events in the History of Earth, Life and Climate course and realized that they had very little previous knowledge about the impact of climate on human history. The main goal of this project is to help and encourage K-12 teachers to incorporate information about climate change in classrooms outside STEM disciplines.

One of the approaches towards achieving this goal is the development of an open-access document or open educational resources (OER), in part inspired by The Teacher-Friendly Guide^TM to Climate Change, a publication by the Paleontological Research Institution, whose focus audience is primarily high school Earth and environmental science teachers. Similarly, our OER serves as a guide for teachers, but it focuses on exploring the relationships between climate change and human history and culture so that this climate-related information could also be included in history, social studies, literature, art, music, language and other non-STEM classes.

Our OER has an extensive table of contents with links to individual topics organized in the themes that generally correspond to these non-STEM fields. For each topic, a student researcher has prepared a short, bulleted list explaining how the topic is related to climate, together with links to credible resources for any additional, more detailed information. Climate and educational professionals have been consulted to provide feedback and help create questions and activities to use in the classroom. We expect that the use of this OER and other similar approaches could greatly improve overall climate literacy and increase general understanding of the impact of climate on human societies so that any current and predicted future consequences could be better comprehended and assessed by the public.