Climate Change Education in Formal Settings, K-14 A Workshop Summary (2012) / Chapter Skim
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The report points to the importance of formal and informal education in supporting the public's understanding of those challenges climate change will bring, and in preparing current and future generations to act to limit the magnitude of climate change and respond to those challenges. Recognizing both the urgency and the difficulty of climate change education, the National Research Council, with support from the National Science Foundation, formed the Climate Change Education Roundtable.
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The goal of the workshop was to raise and explore complex questions around climate change education, and to address the current status of climate change education in grades K-14 of the formal education system by facilitating discussion between expert researchers and practitioners in complementary fields, such as education policy, teacher professional development, learning and cognitive science, K-12 and higher education administration, instructional design, curriculum development, and climate science. In an effort to provide a common frame for the workshop participants, the steering committee based the initial assumptions about climate change on the recent National Research Council (2010)
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It will provide an opportunity for discussion between expert researchers and prac titioners in complementary fields, such as education policy, teacher professional development, learning and cognitive science, climate change, K-12 and higher education administration, instructional design, and curriculum development. Dis cussions at the workshop will focus on identifying how the issue of climate change is currently taught in school; what research indicates about how best to teach climate change in K-14 settings; what factors impede teaching climate change in schools; and how to best articulate the connection between climate change education in K-12 and higher education.
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The vital importance of an informed citizenry is illustrated, Anderson noted, in data presented at the Roundtable on Climate Change Education's first workshop, on the diversity of beliefs people hold about climate change. In a series of studies that examined how the American public responds to climate change information, researchers categorized the public into "Six Americas"1: the six basic response categories are "dismissive," "doubtful," "disengaged," "cautious," "concerned," and "alarmed." "It's disturbing," Anderson observed, "that between 2008 and 2010 public opinion shifted away from concerned toward dismissive." An even more important issue demonstrated in these studies, Anderson stressed is that public understanding of factual issues related to climate change is distinctly limited (National Research Council, 2011a)
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after its author Francis Bretherton of the University of WisconsinMadison. The Bretherton report was published at a time when climate change research was "gaining traction" and was very influential in the scientific community, Edelson noted.
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These were "paradigmatic breakthroughs," Edelson observed, which are now uncontroversial in the earth science community and which distinguished that field from other science disciplines that tend to study systems in isolation. More recently this approach has been diluted, Edelson explained, by a tendency in the field of earth science education for people to advocate for particular spheres.
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Such conflict would be much easier to overcome if the debate took place among people who already had achieved the basic literacy described above. The heat and energy of such conflicts can have long-lasting impacts, and Edelson expressed concern that conflict has the potential to derail the progress of the new science education standards that specifically include references to climate science and climate change education.
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"With the decline in geography education and social studies," he noted, "teaching of geographic reasoning and geospatial thinking has almost disappeared." Systematic approaches to decision making are not taught anywhere in the curriculum, Edelson noted, but people need "to be able to evaluate evidence, project consequences, weigh options and trade-offs, and use their values to make well reasoned decisions." Adding climate change education on top of all that is already in the curriculum, in Edelson's view, is likely to yield a situation in which "some teachers do a great job with it, some teachers don't understand it or don't believe it and don't do it at all, and a lot of people will try to squeeze it in amongst a bunch of other competing priorities." Instead, he suggested, it would be possible to work backward from an understanding of the tasks that young people will face when they leave school and establish educational priorities that will truly prepare them. For example, Edelson emphasized, "students should be able to make well-reasoned decisions about purchases of cars and major appliances that take into account environmental impact, including climate change.
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In the short term, he said, it is important to work within the current system and integrate climate change into the classroom whenever possible. The long-term strategy he advocates is to address the fundamental problem with earth systems understanding and to treat climate change in the context of both earth and human systems.
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10 CLIMATE CHANGE EDUCATION: FORMAL SETTINGS, K-14 literacy differed from that of ecology, noting that from his perspective it was a description of ecology. Edelson responded that the diagram is a marvel for just that reason -- each community sees it as a model of their own discipline.
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