Read for the Earth: Connecting Formal and Informal Climate Change Education for First Year College Students

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This is a pilot project to extend and broaden utilization of existing educational resources created with support from the NSF to each of two PIs in separate large grants 5 years ago. The extension is through a type of course that has become ubiquitous across American colleges and universities: the "freshman seminar." The information content of the existing educational resources meets the criterion of being important and interesting to a broad spectrum of our society. The materials that underpin this pilot are broad, varied, and adaptable to local circumstance as well as extensible as new knowledge emerges. A positive characteristic of the project is that the base resources (book, video, social media outlets, web sites) exist, the delivery vehicles (freshman seminar courses) exist, a publicly visible scientist is available and interested in participating, and that scientist's MOOC on climate science will continue to be offered and could become part of local courses. This pilot project will test the response of faculty who teach environmental science courses to the opportunity of selecting freely from a rich set of materials that can be used as course building blocks. It will also examine the impact that their use has on enrolled students.