California’s Hub for Environmental Learning and Action (CHELA) is a new website resource for inquiry- and place-based learning on topics related to environmental literacy and environmental justice. It is designed to leverage the power of geospatial technologies to accelerate environmental learning, connect to students’ lived experiences, and support them in pursuing their interests in confronting […]
Launched in spring 2020, the Climate Champions pilot project, based at the University of California, San Diego, models K–12, university, and community collaboration for climate action and climate justice. It was inspired and informed by the Environmental and Climate Change Literacy Project and Summit (ECCLPS) and its report that the University of California (UC), California […]
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 […]
“Research shows that weaving together science and language development can increase students’ academic performance in reading, writing, and science simultaneously.” ~ Sarah Feldman and Verónica Flores Malagon, “Unlocking Learning: Science as a Lever for English Learner Equity” The path that led me to environmental literacy education was less than direct, more of a meandering road. […]
On October 17, 2019, over 100 educators from across California gathered to kick off the annual California Association of Science Educators (CASE) California Science Education Conference in San Jose with the Climate Summit Pre-Conference Day. This event was brought back by popular demand after being first held at the 2018 CASE conference in Pasadena. As […]
Looking at the seventh-grade standards for history–social science (HSS), it is easy to have a panic attack. How is it possible to teach almost 1,500 years of history over five continents in ten months? This has been an ongoing struggle for many seventh-grade HSS teachers, and the result has usually been the same: a survey […]
On April 21, 2020, the California Subject Matter Project (CSMP) held a virtual environmental justice charrette. The charrette brought together CSMP leaders, environmental justice organizers and scholars, and student leaders with the goals of exploring the following questions: What is environmental justice? What does teaching for environmental justice look like in practice? How does it […]
For four years, we at the California State University, Northridge, Science Learning Colaboratory have been working with Los Angeles-area science teachers to develop relevant and engaging lessons and activities that integrate California’s Environmental Principles and Concepts (EP&Cs) into the California Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) secondary school science curriculum. For three years, we have used […]