Climate Change and Environmental Justice Program

Ten Strands is partnering with the San Mateo County Office of Education and the California Department of Education to arrange for the creation of K–12 open education resources focused on climate change and environmental justice.

The State of California invested $6 million to create curricular resources to help teachers promote students’ understanding of climate change and environmental justice, leading to action in their communities. The units will be free open education resources, standards-based, and they will integrate California’s Environmental Principles and Concepts.

With support from a Steering Committee, Ten Strands will oversee and organize the production, testing, and initial dissemination of the curriculum units. The Climate Change and Environmental Justice Program (CCEJP) Synopsis offers a detailed description of the vision, design principles, instructional approaches, strategies, and equity focus of this program. One 15-hour unit of instruction will be created at each grade level.

After implementing a process to solicit and evaluate Letters of Interest, Ten Strands selected seven community- and student-centered organizations to write the K–12 curriculum units. We convened these writing teams in August of 2022. Read more about the convening here. These organizations have diverse experience writing curriculum and providing professional learning, and they demonstrate the following values: 

  • Community-centered work with diverse communities across California;
  • A focus on environmental justice, social justice, and/or equity for the communities most impacted by climate change;
  • Student-centered practices in the development of curriculum and resources; and
  • Access to networks or communities of educators in California to write, pilot and/or field test curriculum.

The writing teams are:

We are excited to introduce each of our writing teams through feature stories in our bi-monthly newsletters. Check out their stories in the list below, which we will continuously update.

In addition to the writing teams, Ten Strands has identified larger organizations that have broader experience in writing open education resources on climate change and environmental justice curriculum and professional learning. With oversight from Ten Strands, these organizations will provide support and capacity-building to the curriculum writing teams to ensure coherence and consistency within and across grade levels.

  • BSCS Science Learning: Provide broad curriculum development support and design the curriculum framework, including unit and lesson design.
  • California Subject Matter Project: Provide expertise related to the California state standards, Environmental Principles and Concepts, content, cross curricular design, and professional learning.
  • Concord Consortium: Provide access and support related to online modeling and data tools such as SageModeler and CODAP.
  • The Climate Collective: Provide expertise related to climate change curriculum frameworks and development.

If you are interested in receiving updates and opportunities to get involved with this new program, as well as receive California environmental literacy news through the Ten Strands newsletter, please fill out the short form here.

Partners

San Mateo County Office of Education

The San Mateo County Office of Education is dedicated to serving San Mateo county's 23 school districts in a shared mission to deliver a top-rate educational experience for nearly 94,000 students. The San Mateo County…

California Department of Education

California is the largest state in the country, serving over 5.8 million public school students and 300,000 teachers, in over 1,000 school districts and 10,000 schools. The California Department of Education's mission is to…

California Global Education Project

The California Global Education Project, formerly the California International Studies Project (1985-2018), is one of nine California Subject Matter Projects administered by the University of California Office of the President. CGEP provides…

Green Guardians

Green Guardians is an Oakland-based start-up focused on environmental literacy and action. Ten Strands is providing consulting services for Green Guardians to develop standards-based lesson sequences that will support K–5 teachers to…

Inverness Research

Education improvement is a complex and demanding enterprise without simple answers. Inverness Research's goal is to help funders and project leaders improve their thinking, their investment strategies, their program designs, and their…