CIFAR Holds “Hands-On” Climate Change Course for K–12 Teachers

In June 2008, researchers from NOAA’s Cooperative Institute for Alaska Research (CIFAR) created and led a novel, hands-on, intensive week-long course in climate change at the NOAA Kasitsna Bay Laboratory (KBL) near Homer, Alaska. Students in this pilot program received graduate or undergraduate credit through the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). They included three teachers from small rural K–12 schools in Alaska, an Alaska resident interested in setting up a citizen environmental monitoring program, and two teachers from large high schools in Virginia and South Carolina. Students learned how to use NOAA and other websites to obtain climate and weather data specific to their location of interest, acquired hands-on experience setting up monitoring transects, and developed their own classroom projects that were presented to the class and the NOAA Laboratory director, Kris Holderied.

Instructors were Susan Sugai and John Walsh (CIFAR), Reid Brewer (Alaska Sea Grant Marine Advisory Program), and David Atkinson (International Arctic Research Center). Logistical and travel support was provided by KBL, UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences (SFOS), and NOAA’s Undersea Research Program West Coast and Polar Regions Undersea Research Center. KBL is a NOAA National Center for Coastal Ocean Science coastal laboratory that operates under a joint agreement with SFOS.

Background: NOAA products were intimately intertwined in teachers’ lesson plans. For example, the project developed by a teacher from St. George Island, Alaska, for a multi-grade elementary classroom, allows students to explore the origins of sea ice and its movement around the Bering Sea. Students will use NOAA data to determine ice levels, placement, and movement over the past 25 years in the Bering Sea and compare average air temperatures, average prevailing wind direction, average amount of sea ice in the protocol years, and draw conclusions about short-term changes in climate.

Significance: The course forged valuable connections between researchers and teachers, and between teachers from within and outside Alaska, to better communicate the effects of observed and anticipated climate change. K–12 teachers, and by extension their students, were introduced to the value of NOAA data and products. This activity supports NOAA Mission Goal 2 - Understand Climate Variability and Change to Enhance Society's Ability to Plan and Respond.