The book doesn’t offer a one-size-fits-all curriculum, Le notes. She recommends that educators highlight “local impacts of climate change that connect with global climate issues,” such as “how buying a bag of chips ties in with deforestation in Southeast Asia.” In California, another possible springboard to the subject is the drought, wildfires and heat wave gripping the western U.S., she says.

That, in turn, inspired her new book, “ Teaching Climate Change for Grades 6-12: Empowering Science Teachers to Take On the Climate Crisis Through NGSS.” (NGSS stands for Next Generation Science Standards, a multistate curriculum effort.)ĭrawing on expert advice from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, climate scientists and more than 50 environmental nonprofits, the book is a primer on rising worldwide temperatures and suggests ways to “get students to think about how climate change affects them directly and how they can take action to fix it,” Le says. To help bridge that gap, Le-a former high school chemistry and nanoscience instructor-organized climate change boot camps for educators as part of her doctoral dissertation at UCLA. The big glitch in California’s new science education standards, which focus heavily on climate change, is that few schoolteachers have the background to conduct lessons on the subject, says Kelley Le, director of the UCI Science Project.Įven new teachers generally receive scant training about the topic in college, she adds, and public-school textbooks largely dodge the issue. Kelley Le, director of UCI Science Project.

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