Education for Community Resilience - A Theory of Change for How K-12 and Informal Education are needed to achieve Community Resilience to Climate Change and other Environmental Hazards
Abstract
NOAA's Environmental Literacy Program (ELP), led by the Office of Education, supports community resilience through grants and in-kind support. The goal of these investments is to support the education of children, youth and adults so they are knowledgeable of the ways their communities can become more resilient to extreme weather events and/or other environmental hazards, and become involved in achieving that resilience. Since 2015, an investment of $9.8M has supported 22 projects which are exploring various approaches in formal K-12 and informal education. All projects are evaluated by an independent evaluator and results are reported to NOAA. Additionally, because education for resilience is a nascent field, we have established a community of practice among the grantees for sharing challenges, evaluation findings, and unintended outcomes. Through this collective knowledge, the community of practice is discovering approaches that are effective and thus more rapidly advances the field.
After several years of investments, it became clear that we needed to develop a Theory of Change (ToC) for our community of practice to describe the causal pathways for the approaches we're discovering to be effective. Like logic models, theories of change are useful for planning, implementation and evaluation of programs. They are designed to demonstrate how a program contributes toward ambitious societal goals along with other actors in the field. Toward this end, the ELP's ToC is being developed so that it is not exclusively based on the work of the NOAA-funded grantees, but is broader in scope so that these activities are seen in relation to other resilience efforts. We have developed a rationale for how education supports community resilience efforts and complements other changes in policies, infrastructure, and community-level relationships. This ToC will be used by our current and future grantees to conceptualize how their local efforts contribute to a broader, national effort to increase resilience, community engagement, and civic action around current and projected environmental hazards. This ToC can also serve as a framework for this emerging field, facilitating collective impact around a common goal and, thus, promoting larger scale implementation of the best approaches regardless of funding source.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMED33E1019S
- Keywords:
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- 0850 Geoscience education research;
- EDUCATION;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 6620 Science policy;
- PUBLIC ISSUES