Facilitating Workshop with NASA, NOAA and CLEAN Newtork at the National Energy Education Symposium

Event Details

Energizing Energy & Climate Education

Symposium PowerPoint

Session Outcomes

Session Organizers:

Tamara Ledley, Senior Scientist, Technical Education Research Centers (TERC)

Mary Jo Leber, Educational Program Manager, Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC)

Joshua Sneideman, Albert Einstein Distinguished Fellow, Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy

Frank Niepold, Communication and Education co-chair, U.S. Global Change Research Program; NOAA Climate Education Coordinator

Frank Niepold, Communication and Education co-chair, U.S. Global Change Research Program; NOAA Climate Education Coordinator

Symposium Overview:

This Energizing Energy and Climate Education Symposium will focus on actions to achieve our mutual goals of improving energy and climate literacy, enhancing access to existing resources and incorporating social media in our strategies. We will examine 1) effective strategies for fostering long-term energy and related climate and global change literacy (Building Critical Mass), 2) effective teaching with energy and climate education resources and increasing the availability to educators of high quality resources (Catalyzing an Energy and Climate Education Explosion), and 3) emerging best practices for utilization of tools such as videos and social media to disseminate resources, to inform and engage learners (Initiating a Chain Reaction).

Building Critical Mass:

An overview of the range of strategic energy and global-change literacy efforts to build the community and capacity to address energy and climate challenges, including energy and climate literacy frameworks and the use of the Collective Impact model, how these efforts relate to new education standards and Green Schools efforts, the importance of addressing doubt, denial, and despair, and a vision for transforming the nation’s 140,000 schools into engaging, inspiring living laboratories.

Models for Catalyzing an Energy and Climate Education Explosion:

Effective teaching methods for generating interest and expanding knowledge in energy and climate education will be described, using examples of energy and climate resources developed by NASA’s Earth Systems, Technology, and Energy Education for MUREP (ESTEEM, formerly NICE - NASA Innovations in Climate Education), including EarthLabs Earth System Science Module, Climate Change in My Backyard, The Green Ninja Project, Climate Science Investigations (CSI), Climate Education in an Age of Media (CAM), the “Ask US” Google Hangout Workshop Series, and the Tri-Agency Climate Education Catalog (TrACE). A brief overview of the types of energy and climate resources freely available to educators will lead a discussion of how to increase awareness of the current energy and climate resource collections and the need for a collective sustainable resource library/repository.

Initiating a Chain Reaction: A shared social media strategy for maximizing energy education to combat climate change and support a green economy

The power of social media to ferment change is proven, from the Arab Spring to the Protests in Hong Kong, from Ellen Degeneres at the academy awards to the “ice bucket challenge”.

Your presence at this conference means you are part of the choir that already recognizes the importance of energy literacy in combatting climate change and leading our nation to develop a new green economy. What can we do to improve our efforts to harmonize? How can we engage in a collective social media strategy to make the desired short term and long term impacts we wish to see in energy education? What would a bottom up approach that engages students in sharing energy educational resources look like? We will look at examples of the effective use of social media within the climate and energy community while also asking, how could we add a shared messaging strategy to them?

Energizing Energy & Climate Education Workshop

Overview

The Energizing Energy and Climate Education workshop will focus on actions to achieve our mutual goals of improving climate literacy, enhancing access to existing resources and incorporating social media in our strategies. We will decide on how we can collectively Build Critical Mass by leveraging existing initiatives and efforts, including new education standards, green schools networks, and establishing a collaborative organization built on the collective impact model, Energize Energy and Climate Education through Professional Development to model effective pedagogies for communicating energy and climate education and by increasing the availability of energy and climate resources through expanding teacher awareness of the existing resources and/or establishing a collaborative, sustainable national resource clearinghouse and Initiate a Chain Reaction through the incorporation of social media and common messages into our individual strategies.

Agenda

The Workshop Facilitators will begin with a review of the major points made in the symposium and the many questions surrounding them. Attendees will then participate in the strand of the greatest interest to them. The strands will encompass the following topics and each group may be divided into subgroups to address specific issues:

1. Building Critical Mass This strand will focus on reviewing the prior work and developing clear next steps to move this forward.

• What are the challenges and opportunities relating to fostering increased literacy through formal and informal education? Energy and related climate education requires a long-term strategy to move beyond short-term, piecemeal efforts, building on existing frameworks, initiatives, and networks. Projects such as the Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) and the Climate Adaptation Mitigation e-Learning (CAMEL) have played a leadership role in developing a long term vision, and potentially can link with a wide range of other efforts, including Green Schools and new education standards.
• The "Collective Impact" model has provided a framework for identifying share vision and other elements of a strategic plan, particularly the need for a strategic backbone and collective governance.

2. Models for Catalyzing an Energy and Climate Education Explosion and Fueling Energy and Climate Education with Effective Pedagogies This strand may be divided in two if sufficient interest is shown in each aspect. We will explore effective pedagogies and professional development models for communicating energy and climate education, elaborating upon the teaching methods introduced in the symposium, as well as devise an Action Plan to achieve the goal of enhanced access to resources for educators.  Many resources have already been collected and reviewed and are available through clearinghouses such as NEED, CLEAN, TrACE, CAMEL, but many other high quality resources have not. How can we make it easy for an educator to find and identify reputable resources amidst the significant number of resources available on the internet? Sustainability is the key issue, as valuable resource collections are subject to abandonment due to loss of funding and the need for maintenance. Recognition of bias in resources and the need for both pedagogical and scientific content review is another key consideration. The potential of existing repositories as models or the basis of a sustainable repository will be discussed.
    
3. Chain Reaction- developing a shared social media strategy                                                                 The goal of this strand is to develop a shared social media strategy.

• How can we help teachers quickly access resources for addressing energy as a cross cutting concept in NGSS?
• How can we engage non-science teachers in using energy as a discussion theme in their history, english, art, poetry, civics classes?.
• How can we increase science literacy on issues of climate and energy?
• What type of student competition models might be used to leverage the social media savvy to support the larger cause?
• How can we get students to be part of the message on energy education resources?
• Devise a shared hashtag (something all agree to use in addition to their own marketing).
• Schedule a regularly held twitter chat using this hashtag.
• How can we leverage a celebrity to join our effort?
• Develop scenarios to encourage teachers to share via social media.
• Investigate collaboration space for making short videos.