The Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) pathway for NSDL is being developed. The primary audience is a broad one ranging from middle school students to college graduates. The goal of the CLEAN collaborative project is the assembly of a collection of approximately 500 authoritative, scientifically sound resources so that teachers, their students and the general citizenry may improve their knowledge of climate and its impact on society and enable them to make better informed decisions about energy use and stewardship of planet earth. The CLEAN pathway utilizes science literacy maps (strand maps) to aid users in finding needed resources and illustrate connections between concepts and how concepts build on one another. The resources are aligned with the AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Scientific Literacy, the National Science Education Standards and, the NAAEE Excellence in Environmental education Guidelines for Learning. Teleconference-online workshops are helping teachers and citizens learn to use the resources. An online community using Web 2.0 social networking tools to promote collaboration, interactivity and knowledge sharing among educators, experts and enthusiasts is being facilitated.
This project is receiving co-funding under the Dear Colleague Letter: Climate Change Education to support the development of NSDL efforts directly related to climate science.
CLEAN Project Outcome The CLEAN digital library provides a collection of reviewed resources for teaching Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness in middle, high school and introductory courses for undergraduates. Through a multi-institutional collaboration, the project developed a process and supporting technical infrastructure for identifying and reviewing pre-existing online teaching materials. Teams of experienced educators and scientists vetted resources through a multi-stage review process. The resources were evaluated for their pedagogic, scientific and technical merits, as well as suitability for use in teaching toward the goals of Climate and Energy Literacy (http://cleanet.org/clean/literacy/index.html). Over 2000 resources were reviewed in the course of six different rounds of review with 513 resources initially selected for the public collection. This corpus of teaching activities, videos, visualizations and short demonstrations is freely available and searchable as an online collection (http://cleanet.org/clean/educational_resources/index.html) that includes detailed reviewers’ notes on the pedagogy, science and use of each resource. Use of the CLEAN collection is supported by a surrounding website (http://cleanet.org) designed to help educators effectively integrate the high-quality teaching materials from the collection into their teaching. The website includes a general introduction to teaching climate and energy science, a set of interactive maps that illustrate the connection between resources in the collection and the AAAS Benchmarks for Science Literacy, and a set of community pages that support the project’s work in engaging the larger educational community. The project engaged educators in contributing to and using the collection through both dissemination and professional development activities. Online professional development workshops included a series of eleven, 2-hour online webinars for middle and high school teachers and four 2-week virtual workshops for college faculty. In the past year, over 44,000 people have visited the website, including over 20,000 visits that engaged deeply with the site spending more than 10 minutes. The review process and technical infrastructure are in ongoing use by groups interested in contributing new resources to the CLEAN collection, and have been adapted for use by three NSF funded projects creating or reviewing resources for other collections.
