Proposal Title
Pulling together for climate change education
Room
Labatt Health Sciences Building Room 236
Start Date
6-7-2011 8:45 AM
Keywords
Plenary Address
Primary Threads
Other
Abstract
The earth’s atmosphere and oceans have been fundamentally altered since the industrial revolution and particularly in the past 50 years, often at rates that greatly exceed those in the historical and recent geological record. Understanding and responding to those changes is one of the most important challenges facing our modern world. Yet climate change science, with its complex links to both natural processes and human activity, has fallen into a systemic hole in the science education system at both secondary and post-secondary levels. In this presentation, I will present strategies we have used at our King’s Centre for Visualization in Science (KCVS), working with a diverse group of global partners to pull together the objectives of (a) increasing climate literacy and (b) supporting science instructors in adopting active-learning pedagogies that situate cognition in authentic science practice and globally important contexts. Through this presentation, I hope to spark discussions about strategies to create interdisciplinary understanding of complex systems such as climate science, while pulling science educators together across learning communities to transform our teaching and learning environments to better meet the needs of learners.
Media Format
vimeo
Pulling together for climate change education
Labatt Health Sciences Building Room 236
The earth’s atmosphere and oceans have been fundamentally altered since the industrial revolution and particularly in the past 50 years, often at rates that greatly exceed those in the historical and recent geological record. Understanding and responding to those changes is one of the most important challenges facing our modern world. Yet climate change science, with its complex links to both natural processes and human activity, has fallen into a systemic hole in the science education system at both secondary and post-secondary levels. In this presentation, I will present strategies we have used at our King’s Centre for Visualization in Science (KCVS), working with a diverse group of global partners to pull together the objectives of (a) increasing climate literacy and (b) supporting science instructors in adopting active-learning pedagogies that situate cognition in authentic science practice and globally important contexts. Through this presentation, I hope to spark discussions about strategies to create interdisciplinary understanding of complex systems such as climate science, while pulling science educators together across learning communities to transform our teaching and learning environments to better meet the needs of learners.