Abstract Detail

Lightning Talks – Germinating Ideas

DeVore, Melanie [1], Pigg, Kathleen [2].

Teaching comprehensive climate change classes: what works, what doesn’t work and how to incorporate botanical content.

Climate change is global in nature and involves interpreting impacts requiring expertise from a wide range of disciplines represented on college campuses. Teaching about climate change requires providing students with several perspectives, some of which will bring in new concepts that are foreign to many on not only an informational, but a conceptual basis. Student with little experience in geology will find thinking in millions of years difficult. Those unfamiliar with thinking on a large spatial scale will be challenged and for many the techniques of studying climate change will be unfamiliar. Understanding climate change requires a grasp of key concepts relating to deep time and the rate and scale of processes. There are at least four causes of climate change: 1) those linked to change in solar output, 2) variations in the Earth’s orbit (Milankovitch Cycle), 3) changes in the distribution of continents and 4) changes in atmospheric content of greenhouse gases. The last cause is the one focused on most often in climate change classes. Teaching climate change, as a comprehensive course has become more and more impractical. Since March 2020, our curricula and instructional modes have been forced to be disassembled and reassembled in new ways, in different classes, and within new curricula. Some approaches were successful, others were not. In this presentation, we will share ways we have accomplished the following: 1) included climate exercises in botany classes; 2) segregated content from the previous global climate change class as a field based course for our Bahamas study abroad program to support our new Marine Science Concentration; and 3) with the aid of our current global climate change class, dismantled the courses and will reassemble it as a seminar base course suitable for any major.

1 - Georgia College & State University, Biological And Environmental Sciences, Campus Box 081, Milledgeville, GA, 31061, United States
2 - Arizona State University, SCHOOL OF LIFE SCIENCES FACULTY & ADMIN, Box 874501, Tempe, AZ, 85287, United States

Keywords:
climate change
phenology
Leaf Margin Analysis.

Presentation Type: Germinating Ideas Lightning Talk
Number: LT2011
Abstract ID:569
Candidate for Awards:None