Using an Interdisciplinary Pop-Up Learning Community to Respond to Climate Change Misinformation in News and Social Media

Introductory college geology or Earth science classes are, for many students, their last formal exposure to science. After that point, they will primarily interact with science, including climate change, through news and social media, as well as conversations with their peers. Information coming through these channels may include scientific misinformation or logical fallacies. To help college students, including pre-service teachers, analyze and participate in productive discussions around climate change, we brought together 158 students from seven Earth science, chemistry, communications, and philosophy courses to participate in an interdisciplinary pop-up learning community on climate change misinformation. Examples from news and social media were shared, with faculty and graduate students modeling responses to each. Students worked in interdisciplinary teams to break down similar examples, with each student acting as the disciplinary expert from the course they represented. Each student provided a written response appropriate to the media item (e.g. in the format of a Facebook comment or a letter to the editor). An additional improv activity was used to demonstrate how to respond to misinformation orally with peers. A retrospective post-then-pre design was used to assess students' self-reported changes in confidence in their ability to effectively speak with or respond in writing to others, including those who hold different perspectives, about climate change. For both oral and written communication, the mode of student responses shifted from neutral (38%, 36.7%) to confident (51.9%, 50.6%). Some students reported being not at all or only slightly confident before the event (27.2%, 29.2%), but far fewer after the event (0.6%, 1.9%). The interdisciplinary pop-up learning community is a format that can be replicated in other formal learning environments to engage students in productive conversations on scientific topics like climate change that are being discussed in news and social media.