MIT’s Day of Climate Funds MIT Sea Grant Coastal Climate Science Project + Other Curriculum Initiatives
MIT’s Day of Climate awards funding to build climate change curriculum to seven grantees representing 10 different MIT departments, labs, centers, and initiatives.
>>View full story via MIT Open Learning / Medium (By Mariah Rawding)
MIT’s inaugural Day of Climate has awarded nearly $125K in grants to support seven Institute projects focused on developing curriculum for learners from kindergarten through high school.
Aligned with MIT’s presidential priorities, Day of Climate is designed to equip K-12 learners and their educators with concise, hands-on educational materials to better understand climate change, its impacts, and potential solutions.
“Day of Climate is a unified, interdisciplinary effort to provide resources for well-rounded, solutions-focused climate education at the K-12 level — keeping traditional and non-traditional education settings in mind,” says Christopher Knittel, professor of energy economics, faculty lead for Day of Climate, and director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and MIT Climate Policy Center.
“With contributions from across the MIT community, the focus of these projects range from climate justice to coastal ecosystems and highlight climate change as a stellar topic for students to exercise diverse skills and consider real-world issues,” Knittel adds. “They have the potential to transform the way educators think about teaching climate change and to empower students as informed changemakers.”
Designed with learners and educators in mind, Day of Climate will host professional development opportunities for educators in early 2025 to enable them to effectively adapt the curriculum to their own classroom. To complement the asynchronous curriculum, Day of Climate will host an in-person event at MIT where learners and educators will have the opportunity to share their experiences with the curriculum and its impact.
The seven proposals selected for funding focus on a number of important topics in conjunction with climate, including: climate justice, renewable energy, sustainable cities, coastal ecosystems, and data science and coding, among others.
MIT Sea Grant Education Administrator Andrew Bennett was awarded funding for a coastal climate science project:
Coastal Climate Science: How climate change is affecting coastal ecosystems
Andrew Bennett, MIT Sea Grant College Program, MIT Edgerton Center
Increased CO2 in the atmosphere is impacting coastal environments with adverse effects such as sea level rise, damage to marine life, and extreme weather. This project will present an overall framework that illustrates how increased CO2 is causing changes in water quality including acidification, temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and others. Students will derive the connections by means of experiments and text investigations then place them in the overall framework, creating the big picture for themselves. This curriculum, building on the work from SeaPerch II, aims to foster climate science knowledge and scientific practices, empowering students to understand and act on climate-related issues.
