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Science News by AGU
Anthropogenic climate change is widely recognized by scientists as the preeminent environmental issue of the 21st century [Hansen et al., 2013]. The immense consequences of climate change across virtually every aspect of society have led many scientists to focus on K–12 climate education as part of their “broader impacts” missions. Engaging with K–12 teachers offers researchers extraordinary opportunities to communicate climate science to a wide audience, with far-reaching effects on future generations.
Schoolteachers can play an essential role in teaching scientific and climate literacy, promoting critical thinking, inspiring environmental stewardship, and preparing students to find climate solutions. These circumstances underscore a growing opportunity for scientists to work with K–12 educators hungry for knowledge, tools, and resources that allow them to overcome challenges of teaching about climate change and captivate their students with the complex scientific and policy questions surrounding the subject.
We describe a sustainable and flexible climate science education program that helps schoolteachers and informal educators in the U.S. Midwest address the challenges and opportunities of climate education. Our program, Educating for Environmental Change (EfEC), builds on the expertise of research scientists and provides educators with training, curricular materials, and professional development opportunities. EfEC’s success suggests that it can be a valuable, adaptable model for other parts of the nation and beyond.
Despite growing interest in climate science education, the topic has proven especially difficult to teach in the United States.
Despite growing interest in climate science education, the topic has proven especially difficult to teach in the United States [Plutzer et al., 2016]. In the Midwest, introducing climate change as a priority issue has been challenging, in part because we’re far from seacoasts battered by worsening hurricanes and storm surge, melting Arctic ice, and other more dramatic climate impacts. The current political climate, in which the reality of the changing climate and the validity of climate science are often questioned, has also contributed to this challenge. Teachers feel pressure from school boards, parents, and students themselves to avoid potentially politically charged topics.
Even here, however, effects of climate change are becoming unmistakable: prolonged heat waves, sharp changes in precipitation patterns, weakened winter freezes and earlier spring thaws, changes in bird migrations, and marked economic impacts on the agricultural economy [Widhalm and Dukes, 2020]. With these effects, perceptions of both policymakers and the public have rapidly changed in the past decade. Residents of Indiana, where we are based, now overwhelmingly support the idea of climate education [Marlon et al., 2022], and as of 2024—thanks to the advocacy of teachers and climate scientists—climate education has been enshrined in the state’s education standards.
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Still, the interdisciplinary nature of climate science offers an additional challenge for secondary educators. Few teachers—most of whom were educated in traditional disciplinary silos—have been trained in climate science and feel comfortable teaching the topic to their students. Furthermore, climate science often falls through the cracks of disciplinary education as education standards and standardized tests emphasize core curricular materials. So it’s often unclear to teachers where climate science should be taught: in physics, biology, Earth science, or specialized (e.g., Advanced Placement environmental science) classes? And despite the broad scientific consensus about climate change, there remain insufficient resources on the topic for K–12 educators and limited opportunities for teacher professional development.
Teacher professional development programs can have impacts that extend beyond immediate participants to much larger audiences.
State-of-the-art climate science, with its relevance to vital societal issues, lends itself well to scientists’ efforts to engage the public about the broader impacts of research. Schools can be key points of contact with families, voters, policymakers, and tomorrow’s leaders, and they may represent the most effective places to focus our long-term efforts for climate change mitigation. From a pedagogical perspective, climate science has the potential to serve as a cross-disciplinary capstone topic in secondary education environments [Leichenko and O’Brien, 2020].
Teacher professional development programs, by their nature, can have impacts that extend beyond immediate participants to much larger audiences. A typical middle or high school science teacher engages 100–125 students in their classes each year. Thus, a professional development program that involves 20 teachers might directly or indirectly affect several thousand students.
EfEC originated in 2017 through a collaboration between Indiana University (IU) scientists and the university’s School of Education. Since then, EfEC has provided teachers with training, support, and tools—in the form of classroom materials, workshops, and other professional development—to bring climate education into classrooms across the Midwest.
To date, we have facilitated programming for more than 600 educators. (During the 2023–2024 academic year, approximately 50% of participating educators were high school teachers, 20% were middle school teachers, and 30% were elementary school teachers.) These teachers have gone on to reach an estimated 48,000 students (calculated by multiplying the number of participating teachers by their reported average class sizes and the number of years they have been teaching since participating in the program).
Several aspects of EfEC’s programming and resources, including curricular materials with a distinct place-based focus for participating K–12 teachers, set it apart from those of other groups—notably, those whose efforts are focused on a national scale such as the U.S. EPA, NASA, and the National Center for Science Education.
Our scientists and policy scholars work closely with a core group of experienced teachers to develop curricular materials. This instructional codesign process takes advantage of the broad experience of all those involved. It also helps EfEC tailor relevant and timely instructional content to K–12 school settings and ensures that lessons align with various state and national curricula and standards, support different learning styles, and promote student inclusion. The approach also provides deeper content knowledge and career connections for participating teachers. For researchers, it provides new strategies to communicate the broader impacts of their science to wider audiences. Here in Indiana, EfEC team members were directly involved in revising the state’s science standards to include a specific focus on climate science.
Scientists can engage at different levels of commitment, from a half hour contribution in a teacher training workshop to developing stand-alone curricular programs.
EfEC also offers a variety of paths of entry for scientists and teachers to participate. Scientists can engage at different levels of commitment, from a half hour contribution in a teacher training workshop to developing stand-alone curricular programs. For example, two of our faculty participants, working together with two experienced teachers, developed a series of workshops and curricular materials focusing on climate engineering [Goddard et al., 2024].
In recognition of the value of participating scientists’ time and work, we provide both assistance with curriculum module development and financial remuneration. This approach has succeeded in engaging 22 faculty and dozens of graduate students from multiple departments and schools across our university.
Paths of entry for K–12 teachers include a broad array of training and professional development opportunities. For example, intensive 4- to 5-day residential “Summer Science Institutes” for middle and high school science teachers (held when most teachers are on summer break) offer a broad introduction to climate change science and policy. Shorter 1- to 2-day summer workshops provide more fundamental introductions to climate science appropriate for elementary-level classrooms.
We also offer 1-day topical workshops on weekends during the academic year, which allows for deeper dives into topics introduced in our summer workshops, as well as monthly “First Tuesday” evening seminars that focus on timely, state-of-the-art research in climate science. And as a holdover from pandemic era adjustments, we continue to facilitate some of these programs online, allowing larger and more diverse groups of teachers to attend, including some from outside the United States.
To encourage participation and value the professional time of the participating teachers—many of whom find themselves overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, and facing increasing financial and institutional barriers to participation in professional development programs—EfEC offers honoraria for attending its programs. We also provide classroom-ready curricular modules and a broad range of materials, including field and classroom resources, that enable teachers to incorporate climate education directly into their classrooms.
With so many topics to learn about and different approaches to instruction, climate education can be dizzying for learners at all levels. We thus structure EfEC programming to help teachers address three basic scientific questions; a fourth question focuses on pedagogy and affective student learning (i.e., learning through emotional engagement):
Each workshop introduces science content relevant to understanding these questions, ranging from technical introductions to global climate modeling or geoengineering to more site-specific aspects of the geologic and historic record relevant to understanding climate change in the Midwest. This content is presented through a combination of introductory lectures, interactive discussions, data and analysis tools, and working through classroom activities that promote curiosity and engagement with the science.
In the process, we strive to engender optimism about contributing to climate solutions. For each environmental challenge we explore—from local to global—we encourage students to imagine and create solutions to address the challenge and empower them to use their knowledge about climate change to advocate thoughtfully for policy changes.
In addition to addressing the four questions above, our workshops often cover other, more focused topics. Examples include policy-related programs on issues in environmental health (e.g., exploring local solutions to urban lead pollution or heat islands) and geoengineering (e.g., imagining and designing possible techniques for modifying global climate systems). Other workshops provide hands-on training with age- and discipline-appropriate climate modeling tools, engage with social science–focused issues such as environmental justice and media literacy, and cover how natural disasters are connected with climate change.
As a concrete product of our workshops, teachers are provided with curricular materials geared for direct implementation into K–12 classrooms.
As a concrete product of our workshops, teachers are provided with curricular materials geared for direct implementation into K–12 classrooms. Lessons explicitly integrate material across science and social science disciplines and take advantage of “teachable moments” related to current climatic events in the news. One example is the “Hurricane Game,” a role-playing exercise that places students in the positions of residents and homeowners on the U.S. Gulf Coast facing an incoming hurricane and making life-or-death decisions using uncertain weather forecasts and mediated by a variety of socioeconomic conditions.
EfEC’s curricular materials, as well as examples of online teaching materials, are currently being collated and will be publicly available through our project website (a few lessons are already available). We are also in the process of producing a searchable database to further improve the accessibility of these materials, as well as exploring other options to share them on national and international education platforms.
Assessment and evaluation are critical elements in all EfEC programming. Each workshop includes quantitative and qualitative evaluations whose results are integrated into the revision and planning of future workshops. These evaluations provide information about the participating teachers’ perceptions of the appropriateness, utility, and transferability of workshop instruction and activities into their teaching.
Postworkshop assessments of all of EfEC’s Summer Science Institutes, for example, have shown enthusiastic support among participants. One hundred percent of the 180 teachers who participated in nine Summer Science Institutes from 2017 to 2024 agreed or strongly agreed that they increased their understanding of how the climate is changing, 97% agreed that they increased their understanding of how humans are causing climate change, and 100% agreed that they expect to apply what they learned in their classroom.
For our Summer Science Institutes, we also conduct both pre- and postworkshop surveys to learn about participating teachers’ (and their students’) attitudes and beliefs about climate change and their self-efficacy for teaching environmental education. These assessments indicate that our programs have improved participating teachers’ confidence to teach about climate change, and the improvement is sustained 9 months after completion of the program, when we follow up with them again. Respondents have reported, for example, that the creation of professional networks, both among participating teachers and between the teachers and research scientists involved, is a key element of EfEC that has influenced their self-efficacy.
Among our plans for future assessment are long-term longitudinal studies of teachers’ incorporation of EfEC materials into their regular classroom programming, as well as direct assessments (including via student surveys, focus groups, and interviews) of how these materials affect student learning.
EfEC’s programming is tailored to the specific interests and needs of teachers in the Midwest. For example, in some workshops, we use state-based climate change assessments [Widhalm and Dukes, 2020] together with a newly developed tool, the Hoosier Resilience Index, which allows students to examine both physical and social-economic conditions that may mitigate or exacerbate challenges of anthropogenic climate change at county and even community levels. Another workshop makes use of EPA’s EJScreen tool to examine environmental justice issues in heavily industrialized regions in Indiana.
Despite its regional focus, Educating for Environmental Change’s approach can be adapted for programs in other geographic, climatic, and academic settings.
Despite its regional focus, EfEC’s approach can be adapted for programs in other geographic, climatic, and academic settings using similar tools relevant to the environmental or climate challenges in those settings.
From our experience, several critical elements are required for success. The first is the initial engagement of a core group of committed scientists interested in global and regional climate-related science and dedicated to communicating their science to broader audiences. In our case, IU’s well-connected School of Education has helped coordinate activities and helped EfEC connect to our state’s K–12 education community.
Another necessity is having a core group of engaged teachers who can help ensure that workshop and curricular materials are appropriately adapted to the target K–12 or informal education environment. These teachers also serve as the center of a radiating network of teachers and students, allowing the program to grow organically. And with some initial momentum, we have found that a sustainable, long-term funding model making use of both public and private foundation grants can be developed.
With these elements in place, we believe EfEC’s approach—demonstrated to succeed in the Midwest—offers an efficacious, sustainable, and engaging mechanism to bring climate science education and literacy to new generations of students elsewhere in the United States and beyond.
Goddard, P., et al. (2024), Incorporating climate engineering into secondary education: A new direction for Indiana’s science classrooms, Hoosier Sci. Teach., 47(1), 38–48, https://doi.org/10.14434/thst.v47i1.37892.
Hansen, J., et al. (2013), Assessing “dangerous climate change”: Required reduction of carbon emissions to protect young people, future generations and nature, PLoS One, 8(12), e81648, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0081648.
Leichenko, R., and K. O’Brien (2020), Teaching climate change in the Anthropocene: An integrative approach, Anthropocene, 30, 100241, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2020.100241.
Marlon, J. R., et al. (2022), Change in US state-level public opinion about climate change: 2008–2020, Environ. Res. Lett., 17(12), 124046, https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aca702.
Plutzer, E., et al. (2016), Climate confusion among U.S. teachers, Science, 351(6274), 664–665, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aab3907.
Widhalm, M., and J. S. Dukes (2020), Introduction to the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment: Overview of the process and context, Clim. Change, 163(4), 1,869–1,879, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02928-7.
Michael Hamburger (hamburg@indiana.edu), Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington; and J. Adam Scribner, School of Education, Indiana University, Bloomington
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