It's here—MIT CATE Climate Curriculum
It’s here—the curriculum I’ve been waiting for—MIT CATE’s Climate Curriculum.
Here’s the mission
To develop interdisciplinary, modular, standards-aligned climate change curricula for U.S. high school teachers in the following core disciplines: History/Social Science, English/Language Arts, Math, Science, and eventually Computer Science. This curriculum is created by practicing high school teachers in varying disciplines, guided by MIT faculty and staff.
After scrolling through several of the units on a range of topics, I selected Climate Literacy — English, Social Studies, Science for my entry point.
From the Teacher Copy
Media Literacy
Grades 9-12
Four 60-minute classes with possible time extensions
Created by:
Michael Kozuch, Gary Smith & Kathryn Teissier du Cros
Adapted from work developed by:
Erin Dalbec & Rob Greenfield
You can meet Michael, Gary, and Kathryn here on the Team page.
I took this screen shot from page 3 of the unit:
Essential Questions
How does the media shape our view of the environment?
How does disinformation around climate change compare with other types of online misinformation?
What tools can the individual use to judge the difference, or draw a line between misinformation and reality?
What are some common tactics used to spread misinformation in the media?
Teacher Background Info
They offer a Teacher Background Info reference sheet to help you prepare to use the curriculum with students (or friends and family). In the introduction to this Background document, the authors write:
“…the CATE project itself owes its inspiration to the distribution of intentionally misleading teaching materials to science teachers around the United States in 2013. Riddled with false science, the book Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming was accompanied by a DVD to enable teachers to easily present incorrect information to their students. For this reason, we believe that it is important to present correct scientific information at the heart of all of our materials, so that all of us as citizens can make decisions informed by good quality information.”
Awesome. All with Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 licensing (you are free to use, remix, adapt, build upon these materials in a way that works best for you and your students so long as you provide credit to MIT CATE).
Thanks to the CATE team for making it available, and a special thanks to Aisling O’Grady, CATE Program Manager, for letting me know that the curriculum is now live (I bothered her a lot to find out the latest shifting launch date).
The team
And speaking of the team, I realized I recognized one of the team members—Lisa Borgatti, the Science Curriculum Developer. I’d just noticed her in a post from the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation where she was featured as one of the Half-Earth Project Educator Ambassadors. I’ve attended Ambassador events and am a big fan.
The Resources
The curriculum provides a mix of resources including the Digital Climate Primer, MIT Climate Educator Guides, the TIL Climate Podcast (now in Season 6), and a Climate Literacy slide deck (on Google drive).
I wrote about the Digital Climate Primer here and here.
I have not seen the MIT Climate Educators Guides so I will be exploring right alongside you. It looks like the guides (39 of them!) were designed as an extension of the TILclimate podcast. Here’s an excerpt from a blurb on the guides page:
The short (10-15 minute), science-driven episodes of TILclimate can be used as a substitution for a lecture, a supplemental introduction to a unit, and more. Episodes of TILclimate and the associated educator guides are designed to further student understanding of multiple interlocking aspects of climate change, with a particular focus on solutions.
In each educator guide, you will find a series of activities that can be taught individually or all together, including:
One or more short introductory activities for group learning (10-25 minutes)
Data-driven deeper dives using trusted visualization and analysis tools (20-45 minutes)
Activities that invite students to think about how they would share their learning with family and friends
Teacher pages that provide setup instructions, discussion questions, background resources, a summary of relevant skills, standards and disciplinary core ideas, and adaptation suggestions for science, social science, and ELA teachers
Definitely make time to explore the guides. From what I’ve seen in a quick overview, they are really well organized and cover dozens of important topics.
The other resource I have previewed so far is the Climate Literacy Slides that support this unit on Climate Literacy. I walked through the 49 slides and found them all very engaging. I especially appreciate that this deck teaches the strategy of lateral reading from the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) which I’ve written about here in a blog post titled Thinking like a fact checker and here on Substack as well. (Note: SHEG recently has spun out of Stanford to become the Digital Inquiry Group.)
Ok, that’s all for my preview (and it’s basically a review of only one of the many, many units). You’re on your own now. Dive in somewhere and start to explore. (Laptop recommended over phone viewing…all the better for practicing lateral reading. It’s possible on a phone but it’s a lousy user experience. There is a place for a good sized screen and this is it!)
We certainly do need this now.
Thanks so much for reading. Be well. And please consider sharing this post with family, friends, teachers, and/or colleagues who might appreciate it and put it to work.