The Wrack
The Wrack is the Wells Reserve blog, our collective logbook on the web.
Teaching about Coastal Impacts of Climate Change
Posted by
| March 11, 2017
Teachers on the Estuary Workshop (July 10-12, 2017)
We are putting teachers on the estuary again this summer by offering a free workshop that will give educators data-driven climate change activities to bring back to their classes. The workshop will train up to ten educators in reserve-style environmental monitoring, "coastal blue carbon" concepts, and ways to understand and address climate change.
Please note: The workshop at Wells Reserve will be held Monday, July 10 through Wednesday, July 12, 2017. Review of applications will begin May 30, 2017.
Wells Reserve TOTE Application
Wells Reserve TOTE Draft Agenda
To learn more about TOTE workshops, see the articles at wellsreserve.org/tote.
Why TOTE?
Teachers often don't get much exposure to estuarine and watershed concepts during their own education, so it can be daunting for them to develop a curriculum (and locate suitable data sets) around these topics. TOTE workshops show teachers how to access and employ custom curricula and data that already meet Next Generation Science Standards or state education frameworks.
What to Expect
In the 2017 workshop, teachers will examine the relationship between salt marshes, watersheds, climate change, and blue carbon. Waquoit Bay Reserve recently produced a high school STEM curriculum through its Bringing Wetlands to Market (BWM) initiative on Cape Cod, which focused on the economic value of salt marshes as carbon sinks — natural places to store carbon so it won’t be released into the atmosphere to act as a greenhouse gas. The BWM curriculum will be shared with teachers at the workshop.
Teachers will also be introduced to information that focuses on sea level rise and coastal inundation, and given access to the resources of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s collaborative Sentinel Site monitoring program.
When TOTE teachers return to their classrooms, their middle and high school students will be engaged in student-driven stewardship projects related to the content from the workshop.
Funding
This work is sponsored by the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative, which supports collaborative research that addresses coastal management problems important to the reserves. The Science Collaborative is funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and managed by the University of Michigan Water Center.
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