About Shelley
Shelley Brooks holds a PhD in United States history, with an emphasis in environmental history. She is a program coordinator for the California History–Social Science Project, developing professional learning and teaching resources for K–12 teachers. She lectures at UC Davis in US and environmental history, and she sits on the leadership council of the California Environmental Literacy Initiative to advance environmental literacy in the history–social science classroom. Her book, Big Sur: The Making of a Prized California Landscape, was published with University of California Press and won the 2018 Weyerhaeuser Book Award for conservation history.
I am writing about the Current Context: A Focus on the Environment series, an environment-based current events classroom resource, at an exciting time. The series began in 2017, and all 18 issues were published during Trump’s presidency, when there was a clear disconnect between the science and observation regarding climate change and what the president […]
Even though our classroom at California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH) sat adjacent to a parking lot in the midst of an extensive construction zone, the three-day teacher institute was punctuated multiple times with cries from a hawk perched in one of the few eucalyptus trees nearby. It was a ripe opportunity to think about […]
Touring the Port of Los Angeles, engineering transportation corridor models, investigating the environmental impact of the war in Vietnam, and designing a student webpage to highlight the effects of climate change and globalization on endangered species were a few of the ways that teachers recently explored classroom applications for California’s Environmental Principles and Concepts (EP&Cs) […]
This article was written by Dr. Shelley Brooks in collaboration with Candice Dickens-Russell, Jose Flores, Nate Ivy, and Mary Walls. “Social studies is essential to understanding and addressing our environmental challenges. We usually think of science as the lens for learning about the environment, but without geography, economics, civics, psychology, anthropology, history, and sociology, we […]
We couldn’t have asked for a better setting for our environmental literacy retreat. Thanks to Ten Strands and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, regional site directors from the California History–Social Science Project had the opportunity to gather in mid August in Pacifica to think over how best to integrate environmental literacy into K–12 history–social science (HSS) […]
Nearly every day we hear news that pertains to the environment, whether it’s a local, state, national, or global issue. Of course, this news is not isolated to a single moment in time, but is connected to a wide variety of choices made in the past, some of which were grounded in economics, others in […]