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 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: 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.
Combining innovative computer models, interactive simulations, and local action projects to translate knowledge into action.
This module was created to help high school instructors across academic disciplines to build students’ confidence to take evidence-based climate action. Students are guided throughout the six lessons from a solutions-focused perspective, where they not only explore the scientific causes and impacts of climate change, but also apply their new understanding to the design of a local action project in their school or community. Lessons were designed for instructors to customize the experience according to students’ needs, allowing the teacher to
We encourage you to use these resources in a way that works best for you!
The Climate Impacts and Solutions with En-ROADS module centers on students’ participation in the Climate Action Simulation, an engaging activity where students play global leaders across businesses, government, and civil society who are gathered at a mock UN climate summit to negotiate a plan to limit global warming to less than 2ºC, ideally 1.5ºC. After an initial briefing, students propose policies and actions to be tested in the En-ROADS Climate Solutions Simulator, followed by an evaluation of model results and further efforts to generate a new future climate scenario. The accompanying Teacher Guide for this module condenses Climate Interactive’s Mastering En-ROADS Training Course into a simple package of example lesson plans, google slides presentations, and students labs, so that educators spend less time training, and more time adapting resources for a fun and scientifically robust classroom experience.
En-ROADS activities support the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Read more here.
Key Takeaways from the En-ROADS Simulator
FYI! Aside from building curriculum around engaging role-plays and interactive computer models, the Climate Change Initiative also conducts research on how simulation-based tools impact how people learn and feel about climate change causes, impacts, and solutions. Check out our Climate Simulations Research page to read more about what we’ve found so far, access the full publications, and join our research effort.
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.
Continue reading “Person on the Street (POS) Interview Grades 6-12”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Continue reading “Using Systems Thinking to Understand Climate Change”
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.
Continue reading “Public Service Announcement (PSA) for Grades 6-12”
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.
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.
