Jennifer Cao, University of California Irvine, and Kelley Le, UC-CSU Environmental and Climate Change Literacy Projects (ECCLPs)

It is important to call attention to a critical key solution to catalyze climate action that is missing from the current NCA, which is the focus on PK-12 education and schools. Our education systems play a crucial role in promoting and incubating necessary climate action to bend the curve. The NCA can be a readily used resource by PK-12 educators and students in both formal and nonformal settings to teach about the impacts and risks of climate change in local regions as a jumping off point to helping students think through culturally relevant and responsive community solutions. It can be used as a catalyst to educate, empower, and engage communities through schools to be active change agents with opportunities to not only understand the science, impacts, and recommendations, but to be part of the discourse to maximize on those recommendations as critical proponents at the local level. To catalyze rapid change, educational systems need to be acknowledged and leveraged as partners of solution-oriented thinking at the forefront.

Education is an untapped resource to advance culturally relevant climate action and three-fourths of teachers have not received any professional development on how to teach climate change citing lack of resources, depth in knowledge, professional learning, and more. A dedicated effort to codify all that PK-12 schools are doing as community sites of change, capable of responding to local needs in ways that connect to what research and science reveals shows how the information can be implemented and widely used. Identifying where and what supports our pre-service and in-service teachers are receiving using the data and information from the NCA also provides opportunities for insights on the report’s application to those in the field. We know the NCA can be a powerful educational tool, and advocate for clear case studies, data, and education research efforts to be reflected to inspire more PK-12 educators to lean on this resource.

Asli Sezen-Barrie, National Science Foundation

The United Nations Secretary recently warned that the Earth is moving from “global warming” to a “global boiling” era. This alarming statement comes fourteen years after the publication of The Essential Principles of Climate Literacy by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which provided a framework for integrating climate change into curricula. Since the publication of this framework, the integration of climate change into classrooms has been supported by federal funding agencies (e.g., National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Although significant progress has been made in research and practice of climate change recognition, learning, and action, there remains a need to improve learners’ decision-making for climate action orchestrated across disciplines, contexts, and generations. This study will provide a synthesis of initiatives to reflect on what has been done and reflect for what is yet to be done for crossdisciplinary, crosscontexual, and crossgenerational considerations for making sense of and acting on problems due to the rapidly changing climate. Crossdiciplinary integration of climate change at K-12 schools is critical to provide a cohesive understanding of the impacts of climate change. The usual homes for climate change learning (e.g., science, earth science, environmental science) is limited in representing the complexity of the impacts of climatic changes and requires us to use the tools of other disciplinary homes (e.g., climate data in math, societal impacts in social studies). Beyond crossing boundaries of disciplines, climate change learning should be integrated into and across informal settings (e.g., museums), media, and community platforms. Formal classrooms with existing time constraints can no longer be the only context for learning about climate change. Crosscontexual also implies local, national, and international partnerships needed to understand the scale of the climate change problem, a global phenomenon that inequitable impacts local communities. Finally, a crossgenerational justice perspective requires attention to protect the Earth as we inherited. While we often worry about climate action for the near future, we are at a “turning point” where immediate action is needed to leave a livable world to the next generations.

Anne U Gold, Kathryn Boyd, Frank Niepold III, Lee Frankel-Goldwater, Gina Fiorile, and Patrick Chandler, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), Boulder, NOAA Washington DC, Climate Program Office, and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), Education & Outreach

Education plays a pivotal role in fostering climate literacy and driving action towards addressing the pressing challenges of climate change. The upcoming release of the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) in late 2023 presents a unique opportunity for educators and interdisciplinary researchers to explore its potential as a transformative resource within education efforts. NCA5 is the foremost repository of climate-related information in the United States, offering a comprehensive understanding of climate science, local impacts, and potential solutions. As the urgency to address climate change grows, the need for climate literacy becomes increasingly evident. This makes NCA5 an invaluable tool for educators seeking to instigate local climate empowerment.

In our presentation, we will share examples of how the NCA has been effective in framing educational and engagement materials that guide learners to delve into its nuanced scientific findings, provide insights into climate-related impacts, and explore culturally relevant community-driven solutions.

Based on NCA 3 and 4, the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) developed a series of guides for educators that help to unpack the key messages of each regional chapter and point to related, high-quality online resources. With the pending release of the NCA 5, CLEAN will update these existing teaching tools, guides, and the map-based display of NCA impacts and will highlight innovative approaches to incorporate the wealth of the NCA knowledge into curricula, instructional materials, and outreach programs. It will also support educators in bridging the gap between scientific concepts and real-world implications with a focus on acknowledging and respecting diverse cultural perspectives.

In our presentation, we will share details about the approach of collaboration with regional education and science experts. We will also share the connection bet the NCA framework and the CLEAN collection, and its alignment with relevant educational resources. We will describe how we have been using the NCA as a catalyst for climate literacy and climate empowerment.

Don Haas, Ingrid H.H. Zabel, Alexandra Moore and Robert M Ross, Paleontological Research Institution, and Cornell University

The climate emergency, like all major societal challenges, is a problem that is both highly interdisciplinary and best understood from a systems perspective. The systems of formal education, especially from grades 6 to 16, are notoriously bad at interdisciplinary teaching and building understandings of complex systems. The Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) is a highly interdisciplinary document exploring and explicating the complex interplay of human and natural systems at the heart of climate change. Can NCA5 be a useful tool in overcoming the formal education system’s struggles with teaching in interdisciplinary ways about complex systems?

We will work to reveal why formal educational systems are so resistant to interdisciplinary approaches and the closely related difficulties those systems have with nurturing understandings of complexity and complex systems and suggest ways that the NCA5 might be used to overcome (or at least reduce) these difficulties.

Questions relating these struggles to NCA5 include:

What are the implications of the 40% reduction in carbon emissions from electric power generation in the US since 2005?

What does the fact that most Americans are unaware of these emissions reductions imply?

Earlier NCAs were presented on the internet in different ways. What explains these differences and how do the differences affect how NCAs might be used in teaching and learning?

We will suggest a multidisciplinary approach as a stepping stone to interdisciplinarity. By our definition, a multidisciplinary approach to teaching climate and energy means addressing the content across multiple courses and disciplines but in an only loosely coordinated way. While a more coordinated approach is highly desirable, finding the time necessary to coordinate is a substantial obstacle. The great breadth of content within NCA5 allows for productive attention to be paid to the report across the disciplines.

While repetition of specific content should be done strategically, it is a higher priority to increase learners’ engagement in learning about climate and energy than it is to do so perfectly.

While we will raise more questions than we answer, participants will gain insights into the barriers to teaching about climate and energy in interdisciplinary ways, and into how to use NCA5 to overcome those barriers.

Fawn Canady, Sonoma State University and Heather Clark, UCLA

NCA5 can be part of a commitment to empowering K-12 teacher candidates across disciplines with the knowledge, skills, and disposition to teach climate literacy and climate justice. In this session, we identify interdisciplinary opportunities and make specific recommendations to help teachers understand and use the report. We argue that education is instrumental to adaptation and mitigation efforts related to our changing climate.

We are teacher educators at CSU, the single largest producer of teachers in the state and among the largest in the nation. We have precious little time with candidates to start them on their professional path, but we are committed to empowering them with the knowledge, skills, and disposition to teach climate literacy and climate justice. We want to use NCA5 as part of that commitment. Reframing NCA5 would position it as a resource that teacher educators are confident teaching and that their candidates will value and use.

An important first step would be to invite teachers as users of NCA5. Naming teachers explicitly as a target audience of the report would reframe the way the report is received, and in time, written. The report should include and highlight resources for educators and students.

Second, invite all teachers from all subject matters. Vol. I of NCA4 is on foundational science and Vol. II is focused on the social dimensions, yet we argue that the whole report must be framed as the domain of all teachers from all disciplines. For too long, climate change has been siloed in science courses. As a result, we are now living with the erroneous idea that climate change is a problem of science when we know it's a sociopolitical crisis. Just as climate change belongs in every domain, teachers from all subject matters must feel that this information belongs in their courses, is relevant to their disciplines, and that their student's success in their subject matter can be connected to developing climate literacy.

Brittany Jefferson, CWC Los Angeles

This session is designed to communicate my methodology for implementing a justice centered, interdisciplinary climate literacy framework in my classroom by developing my own climate literacy. Teachers can develop their own climate literacy and that of their students by using the NCA5 and required state content standards as anchor documents. NCA5 and climate related topics can be integrated into state standards across all subject areas. Students can develop Reading, Writing, Math, Science, and Social Studies skills and content knowledge. By implementing integrated units that address multiple subject areas, skills, and content standards through climate related topics. Integrated units allow for teachers to be efficient planners and implementers of quality instruction, even with the increasing demands of the profession. NCA5 can act as a connective tissue of the separate subjects, standards, and skills teachers are required to teach and students are required to demonstrate. This leaves room for relationship building, social emotional learning, and social justice related topics.

Emily Harris, Kathryn Hayes, Eric Nolan, Alexis Gibson, Adrian Bueno, Michele Korb, Aa'ishah Riaz and Karina Garbesi, BSCS Science Learning and California State University East Bay

The Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) will offer a source of current science, impacts, and community solutions that educators can use to design opportunities for meaningful climate change learning and action. Yet the Climate Assessment community could benefit from learning from educators as well. We hope to contribute to the conversation about NCA5 by sharing a framework for student learning outcomes that supports students to develop knowledge of climate change science, understanding of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, and the motivation and skills to envision a different future. We asked, in the face of an uncertain climate future, what knowledge, skills, and orientations do students need in order to cultivate a) agency to address climate change, and b) identity as a STEM climate solutionary?

To answer these questions, we engaged a team of secondary teachers, administrators, university faculty, researchers, and students to codesign a set of desired learning outcomes for their schoolwide climate justice initiative. Such a co-design process creates ownership among stakeholders, reflecting their passions and concerns, and makes climate learning more likely to be adopted and deeply implemented across the entire school.

The co-design process involved brainstorming and revising the learning outcomes over eight months through meetings, focus groups, and asynchronous feedback. We used critical transformative sustainability learning theory (CTSL) theory as an organizing principle for three digestible categories of outcomes: heart (translation of values and passion into behavior), head (transdisciplinary content knowledge) and hands (skills development) (Sipos et al 2008). Members of our research team refined the framework based on existing research and CTSL, which combines critical pedagogy with transformative sustainability learning (Burns, 2015; Lang, 2004; Sipos et al 2008). Figure 1 shows the summarized learning outcomes, organized by student knowledge and understanding of climate solutions (head in blue), student orientation toward climate justice issues and solutions (heart in green), student social and emotional learning competencies (heart in red), and student intellectual skills and competencies (hands in orange).

Shelley Brooks, University of California Davis

Climate change education is ever more important and teachers and students need tools, resources and strategies to understand current realities and predictions and turn education into empowerment. The scientific findings provided in the National Climate Assessment can provide the basis for classroom learning that enables students to identify the challenges and needs in their own communities and begin to think about how to respond.

I am part of a multidisciplinary climate change and climate justice education initiative that prioritizes teaching these issues across the curriculum. Just as the causes of climate change are many, and solutions and adaptations must come from diverse sectors and perspectives, effective climate education should reflect the needed understandings from the fields of science, policy, health and more. The National Climate Assessment provides a trusted source of information that professional learning providers can tap into for programming. With teachers’ limited time to research and gather up to date materials for their classroom, professional learning opportunities can become an important place where teachers can learn how to implement scientific knowledge in discipline and grade appropriate ways. The National Climate Assessment provides information and findings that when shared with students should prompt questions and ideas that can spur action. How does climate change exacerbate existing social inequalities, and what can be done to prevent this? How are social, physical and ecological systems entwined, and what are there ways to build healthier, more sustainable connections? Such questions require investigations across the disciplines. When students investigate these questions and are equipped with accurate information, they can feel less vulnerable and more empowered.

Deb L. Morrison, CLEAR Environmental and University of Washington, Haley Crim, NOAA, Frank Niepold III, NOAA, and Chris Cameron

Climate learning underpins all aspects of just climate action; however, mobilizing both climate learning and action is not always easy. Research indicates that the most effective climate mobilization is done through relational networks that are closely tied together in a multitude of way, known as knotworking (Engeström, 2001, 2005). Additionally, these networks are most efficient in the transfer of learning within and across contexts when learning is facilitated by learning artifacts such as policy and practice briefs, curriculum examples, guidelines for implementation, and other professional learning resources, known as infrastructuring (Karasti & Syrjänen, 2004). In this paper, we reviewed an intentional sampling of exemplar network efforts that are well recognized for fostering climate learning for action across a variety of scales globally to understand the ways that these efforts engaged in knotworking and infrastructuring. The findings of the study illustrate core principles of designing climate mobilization infrastructure and building coherency across these networks. Additionally, principles of environmental and climate justice are interwoven with this emerging model to ensure that the practices and outcomes of such efforts foster justice. Emerging climate change and sustainability learning efforts at varied scales across the globe are helping to mobilize climate action, understanding the ways in which well knotworked and infrastructure networks, and the connections between networks, help to mobilize and accelerate such action in equitable ways is critical to fostering a just and sustainable shared future.

Ariane Jong-Levinger, University of California Irvine, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Irvine, Chapman University, Schmid College of Science and Technology

Scientific literacy and critical thinking are essential skills that every bachelor’s degree holder in STEM should possess. Here “scientific literacy” refers to the ability to retrieve and critically evaluate scientific information within the context of the current understanding of a broader issue or theory, while “critical thinking” refers to the ability to sort credible from unreliable information based on the available evidence, consensus, and potential conflicts of interest. Climate change represents a “grand challenge,” or problem of global significance, facing humanity that can only be meaningfully understood and addressed by those with both scientific literacy and critical thinking skills. As the preeminent source of information on the effects of climate change in the United States, the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) can serve as a rich tool for the development of scientific literacy in undergraduate-level college students due to its downscaling of climate impacts to a spatial scale that is small enough to be relevant to students who live and/or study in the U.S. Regional climate impacts provide case studies of complex scientific concepts such as non-linear relationships, interacting natural hazards/extreme weather events and feedbacks, and uncertainties with respect to model projections, data sources, and our current understanding of natural and anthropogenic processes. By allowing students to select a region of interest and understand how climate change will affect salient issues for them (e.g., human health, biodiversity, air/water quality), projected climate impacts become personal, and the lessons learned have a greater likelihood of remaining in long-term memory. The implementation of NCA5 at the undergraduate level also provides an opportunity for educators to be involved in the development of curricula on scientific literacy and critical thinking, such as that delivered by Postdoctoral Fellows in the innovative Grand Challenges Initiative Program at Chapman University. Soliciting feedback from instructors ensures that the implementation will be logistically feasible and allows the material to benefit from the educators’ understanding of the students’ evolving interests and educational needs.

Sally Neas, University of California, Agriculture and Natural Resources, Linnea Beckett, University of California at Santa Cruz, Andrea Somoza-Norton, California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo, Estefanía Pihen, Hahami Organization

Scientists have been producing compelling scientific evidence of the climate crisis for over thirty years, but there has yet to be an adequate response to address the crisis. While science is instrumental in understanding climate change, it exists within social, political and economic contexts that inhibit the necessary transformation. To attain such change will require a knowledgeable, engaged citizenry taking sustained, collective action. We argue that education can be a lynch-pin in developing an engaged citizenry.

However, climate education is not always effective; it is often rooted in informational learning, with the assumption that information will necessarily lead to action. However, research shows that information alone rarely if ever leads to climate action. Furthermore, the knowledge and narratives often conveyed in typical climate pedagogies center on Western, colonial conceptions of climate change. This begs the question: How, then, can education aid in bridging the gap between scientific understanding of climate change with grassroots efforts in order to generate a new generation of climate literate citizenry primed to transform the world?

The urgency of the climate crisis thus presents an important opportunity to reimagine education to center justice, youth agency and the voices of communities as experts alongside climate scientists. Such education would center culturally relevant pedagogies, which help integrate youths’ experiences with climate science, and also explore the connections between climate change and racial and economic injustices. Culturally relevant pedagogies would also value and highlight diverse forms of knowledge, like Indigenous knowledge and the experiences of communities experiencing climate change first and worst. To reimagine education is a lofty project, requiring diverse, creative thinking and multifaceted approaches. It will involve training and supporting pre-service and in-service teachers; partnering with local organizations; and garnering the support of administrators. We don’t presume to have all the answers. Instead, we are excited to collaboratively think about how to re-position education to collective action.

Adina Paytan, University of California Santa Cruz - Institute of Marine Sciences, Sarah Pedemonte, University of California Berkeley, and Emily L Weiss, Lawrence Hall of Science

We will share a program designed to create a systematic approach to ensuring equitable access to locally relevant climate learning experiences for high school students (aligned with NCA5) in a majority Latiné school district in an agricultural community. The program will support teachers across science disciplines and schools and facilitate collaboration with each other and with local Community Partners to create and implement meaningful, data-rich, locally based climate relevant lessons. The project will enrich students’ learning ecosystem such that each student has at least one, and likely two, trained teachers during their high school trajectory. The project will also create a learning ecosystem for teachers incorporating the assets and expertise of Community Partners, professional learning experiences, their existing science curriculum, newly created learning experiences, and evidence of student impacts to support iterative design of the student learning experiences. The project will leverage existing community-based partnerships, as well as climate and data activities from ACLIPSE (Advancing Climate Literacy through Investment in In-service and Pre-service Science Educators).

The Goals of this program are to:

Design and implement a series of experiences for high school science teachers to engage with local Community Partners and their data to foster learning and collaborations (Teacher Learning);

Facilitate the co-creation of student learning experiences that increase the number of authentic, data-rich, and locally-relevant lessons taught in science courses (Student Learning); and

Create and implement a sustainability plan with the high school science program that includes continued collaborations between teachers and local Community Partners (System Level Change).

During this project science teachers across disciplines will increase the number of real-world, data-rich, locally- and/or personally-relevant lessons they teach in their courses, including examination of climate phenomena and climate change solutions. Students in participating teachers’ classes will demonstrate an increase in perception of relevance of climate sciences; data and climate literacy; science identity; and understanding the role of STEM professionals in addressing needs in their communities.