The NASA Innovations in Climate Education Project: 'Instructional Strategies for Expanding Climate Change Concepts within Readng/Literacy Skills

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. In 2010 the standards were designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that young people need for success in college and careers. In 2013 the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in connection with the CCSS developed revised science standards in performance, prior standards documents listed what students should know or understand, foundations were each performance expectation incorporates all three dimensions from a science or engineering practice, a core disciplinary idea, and a crosscutting concept, and coherence that connects each set of performance expectations lists connections to other ideas within the disciplines of science and engineering. Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) in Elizabeth City, North Carolina has joined with the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in Durham, New Hampshire under the NASA Innovations in Climate Education (NICE) grant to empower faculty of education programs at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) to better engage their pre-service teachers in teaching and learning about global climate change through the use of NASA Earth observation sets. Specifically, professors from MSIs received training with Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and GES-DISC Interactive Online Visualization And aNalysis Infrastructure (GIOVANNI) to engage pre-service teachers in facets of climate education. Grambling State University faculty members served as participants of the NICE workshop for 2012 and were encouraged to develop lessons in climate education from information shared at the workshop. A corresponding project that incorporated the CCSS and NGSS at Grambling State University in Grambling, Louisiana was headed by Dr. Loretta Jaggers. This paper documents activities that pre-service students in the GSU Curriculum and Instruction Department (College of Education) ED 452-Advanced Seminar Methods course have implemented. Activities included: Critique of Climate Education (oceans) articles, Methodology instruction; and design of a grade specific daily science lesson plan based on Climate Education that focused on El Nino, La Nina, seasonal characteristics of the southern oceans and resources from a NASA NICE workshop packet. Lessons designed were implemented on-site of partner secondary schools. The implementation included a virtual component as Grambling and ECSU students interacted via a polycom environment during reports from ED 452-Advanced Seminar Methods students.