Climate Change: Seeing, Understanding, and Teaching
The Denali field camp course, offered through Alaska Geographic, is a four-day immersive teacher professional development course held in Denali National Park. The course was developed by Sarah Bartholow with the assistance of various partners. PolarTREC and ARCUS staff play the role of lead organizer and facilitator for the course, as well as bringing in the invited program alumni as a guest instructor. The course focus promotes developing teachers’ skills for integrating climate change content into their existing classrooms and/or curricula. A PolarTREC (Teachers and Researchers Exploring and Collaborating) program teacher-leader was a feature of the summer 2015 course; this teacher was involved in the course planning phase, and engaged both formally through giving lessons and informally through casual conversation with participating teachers throughout their field course. The intention of the inclusion of a PolarTREC teacher-expert is to enhance translatability between the experience of doing science as facilitated by the course scientists, and the practical constrictions faced by teachers when they then seek to engage climate change issues and ideas their classroom.
As a requirement of the course, participants produced capstones based on their knowledge, interest, and teaching position. The related resources are lessons created by the 2015 participants.