Inclusive & Creative Climate Education
Mid-Atlantic Workshop to Build a Community of Practice around Inclusive, Supportive, Creative Climate Change Education
This workshop occurred in October 2023. Thank you to everyone who supported and participated!
Our summary graphic and report are provided here (ICCEWorkshopReport_UDClimateHubPACUR_2023). The rest of the page is for archival purposes.
How can art and storytelling improve climate science education?
How can including broader knowledge systems enrich climate research and courses?
How do we avoid or manage climate grief while teaching about climate change?
Overview
Join us for a cross-cutting workshop on CREATIVITY, INCLUSIVITY, and MENTAL HEALTH in climate education. Keynote presentations from national experts will provide insights and cutting-edge techniques to improve climate education from the classroom to the curriculum to multi-institutional pipelines. The real work of this workshop, though, will happen in the hands-on activities, crowdsourcing activities, and networking sessions to build a regional community of practice across Mid Atlantic institutions. Participants will include educators from regional universities, two-year colleges, high schools, government agencies, museums and non-profit organizations. Over two days in Wilmington, Delaware, we’ll work to develop strategies to increase diversity in the people, perspectives, and knowledge systems involved in climate education; to develop strategies to address climate grief and anxiety; and to foster the creativity needed to develop innovative solutions and to promote mental and emotional health in students learning about climate change.
Keynote Speakers
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Dr. Julie Maldonado Dr. Maldonado is the Associate Director for the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network (LiKEN), a non-profit, link-tank for policy-relevant research toward post-carbon livelihoods and communities. She serves as co-director of the Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences, which facilitates intercultural, relational-based approaches for understanding and adapting to climate change. Dr. Maldonado is also a continuing lecturer in the University of California-Santa Barbara’s Environmental Studies Program and assistant professor at Future Generations University. She has also served as co-director of the Culture and Disaster Action Network (CADAN) and co-founder of the Disaster Justice Network. Her recent book, Seeking Justice in an Energy Sacrifice Zone: Standing on Vanishing Land in Coastal Louisiana, emerged from years of collaborative work with Tribal communities in coastal Louisiana experiencing and responding to repeat disasters and climate chaos. risingvoices.ucar.edu/about/people |
Dr. Nicola Ulibarrí Dr. Ulibarrí is an Associate Professor in Planning and Public Policy and the University of California, Irvine. A multi-generational nuevo mexicana, Dr. Ulibarrí grew up in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of rural northern New Mexico, where the abundance or scarcity of water is a predominant force shaping the culture, economy, and environment. Her research focuses on enviornmental policy and permitting, with an emphasis on collaboration. She is a contributing author to the 5th US National Cliamte Assessment Adaptation Chapter, and she is an author of the book Creativity in Research: Cultivate clarity, be innovative, and make progress in your research journey, the product of a decade of experience training researchers about the benefits of creativity. faculty.sites.uci.edu/ulibarri |
Tentative Schedule
| FRIDAY – SYMPOSIUM | SATURDAY – WORKSHOP |
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8:30a Coffee, Breakfast, Registration 9a Opening Remarks Activity: Building a Community of Practice 10a Keynote: Dr. Julie Maldonado, UCAR Rising Voices Program on Inclusive Values Activity: Increasing Relevance 12p Lunch & Crowd-Sourcing Resources 130p Creativity Exercise 2p Keynote: Climate Design 230p Regional Panel 345 Keynote: Supporting Emotional Health 430p Closing Remarks |
830a Coffee, Breakfast, Registration 9a Working Session 1 Problem-framing exercise & individual time 1030 Working Session 2 Small group collaborations and feedback on participant-proposed projects 12p Lunch 1p Implementation Plan Working Session 230p Report out from working groups and plans 3p Discussion of Next Steps for Community of Practice & Project Implementation |
Logistics
- Where: Wilmington, Delaware
- When: Friday, October 13th & Saturday, October 14th
- Who: Formal and informal educators from high schools, community colleges, technical schools, universities, government agencies, heritage organizations, and non-profits.
- Cost: None. Applications are required because space is limited and we want to ensure participation from a broad range of disciplines and organizations. (See the application section below for details.) The workshop has some funds to reimburse parking and gas fees for a limited number of participants. Rooms at a group rate are available at the Sheraton Wilmington for participants traveling from out of town. [More details coming soon!]
Professional Development / Continuing Education Credit
Delaware teachers can receive clock hours from the DE Department of Education for this workshop by registering in PDMS with course #31815. All educators will also receive a certificate indicating the number of hours attended at the end of the workshop (8 for Friday or 15 for both days).
Goals & Products
We have several goals for this workshop:
1. Our immediate goal for the Friday Symposium is to provide educators with new ways of thinking about climate education, not just as a technical STEM field but as a societal issue underlying a wide range of disciplines and requiring deep engagement with creativity, emotional regulation, communication, and alternative ways of knowing and generating knowledge. We will use a pre- and post-workshop survey to assess whether and how the workshop changes participant perspectives.
2. Our immediate goal for the Saturday Workshop is for participants to produce concrete strategies that they can implement in their class modules, course designs, curriculum revisions, articulation agreements, or recruitment pieplines (recognizing that some of these concrete strategies will only produce the first steps and a plan for further action). Participants in the Saturday workshop are asked to propose a project they are interested in working on (e.g., to incorporate Indigenous knowledge in their course design, to integrate a creative activity into a climate class module, or to work with partner organizations to improve pipelines for climate education). Participants can change their project goals based on the Friday materials and networking, but we will use the initial proposals to create small groups who can provide feedback and collaboration during the Saturday workshop.
3. Across both days, we will crowd-source a set of resources related to creativity, mental health, climate emotions, inclusive approaches, and alternative knowledge systems. The Climate Hub at UD has begun curating a set of climate support resources and modules on Canvas for educators who want to integrate climate into their existing classes, and we will host this crowd-sourced set of resources, distribute it via national channels, and work to build still more publicly accessible educational support modules in a range of formats.
4. Longer term, we see the ICCE Workshop as a place to start building an enduring community of educators in the Mid-Atlantic region who can collaborate, share resources, and engage across disciplines and organizations to enrich our educational programs. To this end, we will have dedicated networking activities; communication tools before, during, and after the workshop to facilitate engagement; and all participants will be invited to the University of Delaware Climate Education Workshop to be hosted in Spring 2024 as a next step in continuing the conversations begun at this workshop.
5. We will document the workshop and our lessons learned as a possible template for similar workshops in other regions of the United States.
Partners & Organizing Committee
The workshop is funded by the President’s Advisory Committee of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research (link). We are grateful for their financial support and vote of confidence for our vision!
ICCE (ICY) is the collaborative effort of many people. Members of our organizing committee include:
• Dana Veron, Director of the Climate Change Science & Policy Hub and Associate Provost for Faculty Development, University of Delaware
• A.R. Siders, Director of the Climate Change Science & Policy Hub and Associate Professor in public policy, geography, and disasters, University of Delaware
• Erika Chance, Business Administrator of the Climate Change Science & Policy Hub, University of Delaware
• Bella Andres, Communications Undergraduate, University of Delaware
• Neri De Kramer, Faculty Coordinator, Associates in Arts Program, University of Delaware
• Gulnihal (Rose) Ozbay, Associate Dean of Cooperative Extension and Applied Research and Professor of Natural Resources, Delaware State University
• Tami Lunsford, Marine Science and Biology Teacher, Newark Charter School and Education Consultant (Milken Education Award Winner)
• Stacy Bartkowski, History and Geography Teacher, Newark Charter School and National Geographic Educator
• Carlos Martinez, AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation, Chair of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Spirituality, Multifaith Outreach, and Science (COSMOS)
Applications
Please fill out the following application. It is not overly time-consuming. We have a limited capacity and these questions will help us to ensure that we engage a broad range of disciplines, perspectives, and organizations.
THE WORKSHOP IS COMPLETE. We are no longer accepting applications.
If you encounter any problems submitting your application, please contact us at ClimateChangeHub@udel.edu