by Judith Curry
Some news from the climate education front this week.
The good
Andy Revkin of dotearth has been writing some very interesting posts related to climate education.
From his article Climate 101: Online and Free:
As part of the trend in higher education toward moving more course offerings onto the Web, the University of Chicago has launched Open Climate 101, an online version of a popular course led by David Archer that explores for non-science majors the body of research pointing to a rising human influence on the climate system.
It’s built around Archer’s climate text, “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast” (sample chapter).
David Archer also has a post on this over at RealClimate. I haven’t read the book “Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast”. A sample chapter is available “Greenhouse Gases“, which looks quite good. A quick look at one of the video lectures also looks quite good. The level of presentation is more sophisticated than “Climate 101” implies (University of Chicago freshman are very intelligent). Of particular interest to denizens of the technical climate blogosphere, Archer has an online model server, so you can run the following models simply via a GUI interface
- Modtran- Infrared Radiation in the Atmosphere
- NCAR Radiation Code Visible + Infrared Radiation
- GEOCARB Geolocgical Carbon Cycle
- Methane in the Atmosphere
- Orbital Forcing of Earth’s Climate
- ISAM Climate Impacts Model
- Hubbert’s Peak Oil Supply Calculator
- Kaya Identity Growth of the Human Footprint
- CCM3 Browse a Climate Model
From his post entitled Climate in Classrooms:
With all of this in mind, I’m going to try to do a series of pieces on educational experiments aimed at exploring climate science and climate choices (hopefully not mashing these two very different subjects up) in ways that foster understanding and engagement.
Soon I’ll write here on an innovative class at Pace University in which faculty member Claudia Mausner staged a fascinating debate among student teams adopting the climate stances of the three main sectors of American society discerned through the Climate Change and the American Mind project at Yale University: “alarmed or concerned,” “cautious or disengaged,” “doubtful or dismissive.”
From his post Building a “Knowosphere,” One Cable and One Campus at a Time:
Now here’s my broader take on what I’ve begun calling the “knowosphere” — a word intentionally echoing the more allegorical “noosphere,” the “planet of the mind” of Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Whatever term you use, it’s clear that the world is quickly being knitted by new ways to share observations and shape ideas that are bound to have profound impacts on the quality of the human journey.
In his column on Sunday, Tom Friedman explored this terrain through the work of Blair Levin, an Aspen Institute fellow who is leading the Gig.U project. This initiative is aiming to build dozens of university-centered networks for innovation and education around the United States, with the goal of fostering what Levin calls “high-performance knowledge exchange and generation.”
But I’m more energized by what’s already happening with fiber optic, and other links (particularly mobile phones) in parts of the world where cheap access to the Internet remains a dream.
The bad
From the AAAS: Education Advocates Enter the Climate Tempest
Is climate change education the new evolution, threatened in U.S. school districts and state education standards by well-organized interest groups? A growing number of education advocates believe so, and yesterday, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) in Oakland, California, which fights the teaching of creationism, announced that it’s going to take on climate change denial as well.
But after hearing an increasing number of anecdotes about K-12 teachers being challenged about how they taught climate science to their students, she says she began to see “parallels” between the two debates –namely, an ideological drive from pressure groups to “teach the controversy” where no scientific controversy exists. To get expertise in this area, NCSE hired climate and environmental education expert Mark McCaffrey as its new climate coordinator and appointed Pacific Institute hydroclimatologist Peter Gleick to its board of directors.
Excerpts from the Washington Post article entitled Scientists want climate change in young minds:
Climate change subscribers say the fight against global warming will require younger soldiers.
On Monday, the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group that denounces intelligent design and supports an evolution-only curriculum in the classroom, will expand its mission. The organization of scientists, anthropologists and others is turning its attention to climate change, and it will mount an aggressive effort to teach the nation’s schoolchildren that climate change is real and is being driven by human activity.
Ms. Scott maintains that the NCSE won’t advocate for teachers to push liberal policy solutions to climate change, but others fear that students will be targets of political indoctrination.
“If you say it’s man-made, you must be implying some solutions. [Climate change] is taught to promote a particular political point of view, and that’s the problem,” said Kathleen Porter-Magee, senior director of the High Quality Standards Program at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based conservative education think tank.
Ms. Porter-Magee said such efforts essentially amount to “the politicization of curriculum.”
Even if schools don’t explicitly call for cap-and-trade or similar measures, she said, students could bombarded with strong subliminal messages to take action against climate change.
Textbooks and other materials geared toward the youngest students already are peddled to school leaders.
The University of California at Berkeley operates the website globalwarmingkids.net, a subsection of its climatechangeeducation.org initiative. On the website, instructors can order “Global Warming for Young Minds,” a handbook aimed at 6- to 10-year-olds. It also offers “Let’s Stop Climate Change” DVDs, in which a hippopotamus named Simon encourages children to take action against global warming.
With no legal defense, the NCSE and other groups instead will launch a public relations effort. If it is successful, climate change skeptics could become a small minority and might be derided for their beliefs.
From KQED News in California Climate Science in Schools: the Next “Evolution”:
Scott says parents often argue that schools should teach both sides of a controversial scientific issue. But she doesn’t consider the fundamental conclusions of climate science to be controversial. “The idea that scientific topics that are well grounded in basic science, like evolution or climate change, should be balanced, or that all views should be taught, is not one that is very scientifically or pedagogically supportable,” said Scott. She readily agrees that many of the details of climate science are debated between scientists, such as differing approaches to modeling climate change. However, she maintains that “the science community is pretty uniform in its acceptance of the fact that the planet is getting warmer.” Nevertheless, Scott said skepticism toward climate science has gained traction with the general public, so legislators and some school boards are starting to demand that science curricula provide room for doubt.
So [the Center] provides support to teachers who ask for it. “Teachers in general are conflict-averse; they just want to do their jobs,” explained Scott. Unfortunately that means that it is often easier for a teacher to avoid the issue completely than to stand up for the climate science.
California is not immune. The Center in Oakland has documented at least two cases of climate change flare-ups in California classrooms. When an Advanced Placement environmental science class was introduced in Los Alamitos, a small city in Orange County, the school board ruled that global warming should be taught as a “controversial subject,” meaning that the teacher should present both sides of the controversy to students. And, in Portola Valley, a stone’s throw from Stanford University, a parent demanded a debate between a climate scientist and a climate denier after learning that the teacher had shown Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth in class.
JC comments:
Kudos to David Archer for the development of a very successful climate course at the University of Chicago, and for making the course available online. Quality educational materials on climate science that are broadly accessible are very much in need.
Kudos to Andy Revkin for exploring new ideas for university and broader public education on climate change. Exploring the applications afforded connectivity enabled by the internet and cell phones is something that is very timely and very much needed. I especially appreciated this one:
Soon I’ll write here on an innovative class at Pace University in which faculty member Claudia Mausner staged a fascinating debate among student teams adopting the climate stances of the three main sectors of American society discerned through the Climate Change and the American Mind project at Yale University: “alarmed or concerned,” “cautious or disengaged,” “doubtful or dismissive.”
Why am I giving a “raspberry” to the NCSE initiative? This seems like propaganda, pure and simple. Keep it out of the K-12 classrooms.
With regards to K-12 education, there is no particular reason to teach ‘climate change’ in the K-12 curriculum. Climate change is a topic that is more suitable high school ‘science and society’ courses. In such courses, teaching the controversy would seem to be of paramount importance. Critical thinking and understanding the complex societal factors that are influenced by science and influence science itself would be of value in such a course, although intelligent and appropriate handling of such a course at the high school level is a challenge.