Curriculum Modules

These modules include curricula for secondary through graduate school, annotated summaries of major issues, and a range of cross-disciplinary approaches to climate-related topics.

If you are interested in the research that sparked the production of the video modules, you can read more about its background at CAM Research Project. If you are looking for additional interactive learning experiences for your students or community members, take a look at our comprehensive resources for the World Climate Simulation.

Fast Food, Hot Planet

Fast Food, Hot Planet: Sociological Approaches to Climate Change, Food Justice, and Community Sustainability is an undergraduate course at UMass Lowell. With an eye on climate change and sustainability, Fast Food/Hot Planet maps the social and historical dimensions of the crises arising from inequalities of food production and distribution.

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Person on the Street (POS) Interview Grades 6-12

In this media project, students create a video that documents unrehearsed interviews with multiple persons-on-the-street about a specific question or issue in climate science. To produce a compelling product, students will need to both understand the underlying science themselves, and be able to conduct and document a series of interviews to elicit interviewees’ understanding of the science as well.

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Video Mash-Up (Higher Ed)

For mash-ups, students research a climate change science topic in the primary literature, write a narration, and use existing visuals and media resources to create a 4-5 minute media piece that explains their topic. This assignment can be done with minimal use of in-class time. It does not include shooting film, so the only resources needed are computers and editing software, although a microphone and audio editing software can be helpful.

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Public Service Announcement (Higher Ed)

Producing a PSA is an ideal culminating project for an interdisciplinary course on climate change and related topics. The PSA assignment requires high-level synthesis of content and, through it, students learn first-hand about the challenges of communicating about climate change to a general audience in a compelling way.

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Stop Motion Animation for Grades 6-12

Created using paper cut-outs, clay, or drawn on whiteboards, animation can provide an effective means to convey abstract scientific concepts and dynamic systems. Here, minimal class time and resources are necessary. The production and post-production component of the project can be completed within 3-4 hours and only a still camera and tripod are needed.

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Student-Led Video Production

Student-led video production projects have strong potential to actively engage students, reinforce and expand upon science content learned through conventional pedagogical approaches. They can bring active, social, and affective learning into a wide range of instructional environments and leave students feeling empowered to share their knowledge with broader audiences. In doing so, these projects offer a means to overcome many challenges of climate change education.

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Using Systems Thinking to Understand Climate Change

Many of the most important concepts underlying both the science of climate change and our responses to it can be understood using systems thinking concepts. ‘Systems thinking’ approaches take a holistic, long-term perspective that focuses on relationships between interacting parts, and how those relationships generate behavior over time.

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Public Service Announcement (PSA) for Grades 6-12

PSAs are short (typically one minute) pieces delivering a message to raise awareness, influence or change attitudes and behavior of a defined audience. This format is especially appropriate for a cross-disciplinary course in climate change, in which the relationship between climate change science and broader society is a recurring theme.

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Political Economy

As warmer temperatures, rising seas, and extreme weather make climate change an increasingly inescapable aspect of daily life, scientists, economists and social theorists have begun to rethink widely shared beliefs about the free market system.

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Thoreau and Climate Change

Long celebrated as a founding figure in the environmental movement, nineteenth-century naturalist Henry David Thoreau has come to play a major role in the effort to deal with climate change in the twenty-first century.

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