CEREO > Climate Change Education at WSU

Climate Change Education at WSU

5 May 2017 – Town Hall Summary

Climate change (CC) courses are scattered across departments and disciplines, how do we make clearer pathways for students interested in learning more about this topic?

  • The maps above compare the Arctic ice minimum extents from 2012 (top) and 1984 (bottom). According to NSIDC, the average minimum extent for 1979–2000 was 6.70 million square kilometers (2.59 million square miles). The 1984 minimum was roughly that amount, so a comparison between 2012 and 1984 gives an idea of how much conditions this year strayed from the long-term average. The minimum ice extent in 2012 was about half the average.Climate Change as a UCORE course: There appears to be a need/room for a new non-majors (UCORE) course that could serve as a way to more broadly engage undergrads (esp. if it had no lab requirement)
    • There is already a course on the books in SoE (currently not being taught) that could be reworked with minimal effort to be this new course
  • Aggregating information on existing courses that teach about climate science and climate change:  Knowing what current course are and what they cover could help instructors identify where overlaps or redundancies exist.  If information were aggregated and distributed/made available, it could also provide a scaffold for helping students interested in climate science and change find courses to help them deepen their understanding of the topic and explore ideas around CC from different perspectives. It could also help us identify where there are current gaps.
    • CEREO is interested in helping aggregate these data.  Those who teach courses with climate science/change content are welcome to enter their course info on this Google Sheet: https://tinyurl.com/m6hcdxp
  • Climate Change as an interdisciplinary certificate program: This could be potentially appealing to students who’d find value in documenting their interest in CC while pursuing their disciplinary or departmental degrees. It could utilize these pre-existing courses to ensure students were exposed to a breadth of CC issues and topics (spanning humanities, arts, social and physical sciences and engineering), and perhaps offer extra experiences that student might find attractive
    • Extra experience: Student delegation to UN Framework convention on CC- WSU could go through application process to allow students to observe UN meetings

Next Steps:

  • Faculty will work on developing a UCORE course
  • Encourage missing key representatives to join the conversation (e.g., Crop and Soils, Economics, CSANR, Global Animal Health, College of Medicine, Honors College, Sociology, Murrow College of Communications)
  • Encourage faculty with classes covering CC to enter info into database: https://tinyurl.com/m6hcdxp

Attendee info here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4uHm3B8FEZacklVN3BzVlYtMkU