NCSE’s Berbeco on Teaching Climate Change
NCSE’s Berbeco on Teaching Climate Change
To the conservative climate denialists dotting the landscape this is just more proof that scientists are working together with those communist teacher’s unions in a vast green conspiracy to indoctrinate our children. For the thinly veiled fundamentalist zealots of the right, this is just another reason to home school and scream for vouchers for their religious schools.*
NCSE’s Minda Berbeco contributed “Getting the Science Right: Teaching Climate Change in the Classroom” to California Classroom Science, a publication of the California Science Teachers Association. “As the newest Programs and Policy Director here at the National Center for Science Education, I am constantly asked where educators can find good lesson plans and classroom activities to teach about climate change,” she writes, citing three resources in particular — the Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network, the Alliance for Climate Education, and the ECO2School in Sonoma County, California — as models of good scientific and pedagogical practice.
Berbeco concludes, “Students will need to have a good understanding of the science of climate change in order to make educated and thoughtful policy decisions about the consequences of climate change in the future. Unfortunately, many teachers avoid the subject, because they feel poorly prepared to address the many questions that can arise or are concerned about bringing controversy into their classroom. In addition, the resources are not yet in place at the state level to encourage them to present the science accurately and effectively. With lessons and programs such as the ones described here, though, it is becoming easier for teachers to integrate climate change into their science teaching.”
The Resources:
Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network
Alliance for Climate Education
[ * Of course the average person knows that The Green Dragon Conspiracy is really just a bad Kung Fu movie featuring “boomerang fan man”.]