Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN)

Tamara Shapiro Ledley, Mark S McCaffrey, Anne U Gold, Susan M Buhr, Cathryn A. Manduca, Sean Fox, Karin Kirk, Marian Grogan, Frank Niepold, Susan Lynds, Cynthia Howell

The US Global Change Research Program and a consortium of science and education partners in 2009 concluded “climate change will bring economic and environmental challenges as well as opportunities, and citizens who have an understanding of climate science will be better prepared to respond to both.” In order for citizens to achieve that understanding there is a clear need to support teachers, students, and the public in becoming climate and energy literate and to enable them to make responsible decisions about the environment and energy use for themselves and for society. However, to pursue climate and energy literacy it is necessary to identify and access educational materials that are scientifically accurate, pedagogically effective, and technically robust, and to use them effectively.

The CLEAN Pathway (http://cleanet.org) is a National Science Digital Library (http://www.nsdl.org) project that is stewarding a collection of materials for teaching climate and energy science in grades 6-16. The collection contains classroom activities, lab demonstrations, visualizations, simulations and more. Each resource is extensively reviewed for scientific accuracy, pedagogical effectiveness, and technical quality. Once accepted into the CLEAN collection, a resource is aligned with the Climate Literacy Essential Principles for Climate Science, the AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy and other national standards. The CLEAN website hosts a growing collection of currently 300+ resources that represent the leading edge of climate and energy science resources for the classroom.

This poster will describe the avenues the CLEAN portal that can help educators improve their own climate and energy literacy and how to effectively integrate the climate and energy principles into their teaching; and the review process that can enable your climate and energy science and technology tools to be made available through the CLEAN portal. Submitted by: Tamara Ledley, TERC / Climate Literacy Network, [email protected]