Exploring Climate Change Through Students’ Place Connections and Public Data Sets

Abstract

Climate change is a pressing societal challenge. It is also a pedagogical challenge and a worldwide phenomenon, whose local impacts vary across different locations. Climate change reflects global inequity; communities that contribute most to emissions have greater economic resources to shelter from its consequences, while the lowest emitters are most vulnerable. It is scientifically complex, and simultaneously evokes deep emotions. These overlapping issues call for new ways of science teaching that center personal, social, emotional, and historical dimensions of the crisis. In this article, we describe a middle school science curriculum approach that invites students to explore large-scale data sets and author their own data stories about climate change impacts and inequities by blending data and narrative texts. Students learn about climate change in ways that engage their personal and cultural connections to place; engage with complex causal relationships across multiple variables, time, and space; and voice their concerns and hopes for our climate futures. Connections to relevant science, data science, and literacy standards are outlined, along with relevant data sets and assessments.

Keywords:

• Climate Change
• Data Science
• Youth Activism
• Multilingual Learners
• Place-Based Science
• Curriculum Design

Climate change is a pressing societal challenge, calling for new ways of teaching that center personal, social, emotional, and historical dimensions. It entails teaching that engages with the causes and effects of climate change on multiple scales, encompassing local, regional, and global interactions and impacts. It also requires attention to the underlying inequities of the crisis based on race, class, and geographic location (Bigelow 2018). Such teaching requires educators to work with, not against, emotions such as hope, despair, and anger (Lombardi and Sinatra 2013; Ojala 2012). It is important to note that positioning students as authors and advocates for collective change, rather than receivers of information, is one step in this direction.

Our work focuses on students writing data stories as a generative approach to bridge students’ personal experiences of socioscientific issues with broader explorations in science, data science, and literacy. In drafting a data story, students draw on their personal narratives, as well as those of others, to motivate analyzing, interpreting, and communicating data. In situating their personal stories within larger data sets and global contexts, students learn how data and personal experience can be woven together to better understand the past and depict the present, as well as to imagine and enact more just futures (Gutiérrez et al. 2019). Existing research has shown how working with data in ways that intertwine narrative texts, storytelling, and personal connection can support holistic and conceptually rich learning across disciplines and contexts (Lee, Wilkerson, and Lanouette 2021; Kahn 2020; Lanouette 2022).

In this article, we share an approach to climate change education that centers students’ special places as a way to connect personal and specific experiences of climate change with the global patterns and understandings highlighted by the Next Generation Science Standards. We describe a multi-week curriculum that supported middle school students in exploring how climate change manifests in their self-identified special places, learning about climate activism around the world, and locating their special places collectively within global data sets to understand the inequitable causes and impacts of climate change. Students author their own data-based stories about these investigations using computational data analysis tools and large-scale public data sets on carbon emissions, temperature, and poverty.

Framework

We begin by highlighting several principles that guided our curricular design and that can be useful in teachers’ own planning and teaching. Together, these principles show how special places can be leveraged to center young people as inquirers and advocates as they integrate data, personal experience, and broader youth voices into their own understandings of climate change, climate inequities, and climate futures. While valuable to all students, these principles have been developed with special attention to supporting multilingual learners (MLLs) by integrating sociocritical literacy practices such as storytelling into scientific inquiry (Gutiérrez 2008; Gutiérrez et al. 2019).

• Principle 1: Center studies of climate change within broader youth-led movements, at local and global scales, to elevate inequities alongside possibilities for collective action.

• Principle 2: Elevate personal connections, relationships and histories with specific places to ground studies of climate change in multiple meaningful cultural and localized contexts.

• Principle 3: Leverage the multiplicity and diversity of students’ place connections to elevate the simultaneously local/diverse and global/unjust dimensions of climate change, its causes, and its impacts.

• Principle 4: Enable narrative forms of data interpretation, analysis, and communication, working with large public data sets to explain the “what and why” of their stories.

Curriculum materials and approach

Exploring Climate through Data and a Special Place is a multi-week science curriculum unit designed for middle grade students. At the broadest level, it is presented as an investigation with the driving questions: How are people affected differently by climate change? What does this look like in places I care about? (Figure 1). Students are prepared to approach these questions in three phases starting with learning about youth-led climate action and connecting to personal exploration of how a changing climate is affecting places the student cares about, moving to explorations of data to highlight global causes and vulnerabilities to climate change, and concluding with the construction of data stories intended to inspire action. We describe each phase in detail, highlighting how the design principles described previously were translated into lessons, teaching practices, and opportunities for student reasoning supported by a 5E progression. Our curriculum materials and data sets are publicly available and bilingual (Spanish/English; see Online Resources). This dual access to multiple languages in science classroom text, data, and discourse has been shown to support multilingual students’ science disciplinary engagement (Suárez 2020).

Figure 1: Slide from Lesson 1, providing an overview for students of the curricular unit’s purpose and progression.

Personal: Engaging and connecting climate to students’ special places (5E: Engage)

In this phase (four class sessions, 50 min each), students begin by reading and reflecting on climate action videos and Photovoice projects written by local and globally located youth. Photovoice (Wang and Burris 1997) is a literacy form commonly used in community science communication. Photovoice involves juxtaposing photographs, images, and text to communicate the author’s perspective on an issue that is impacting their lives and to advocate for change with key stakeholders (see KU Center for Community Health and Development 2024 and other references for additional resources). Students then create their own Photovoice individually for a place that is special to them and examine, through journalistic research and interviews with family members and others, how climate change is impacting this place. The focus of these four lessons centers on the following climate questions: How do youth climate activists use feelings, message, evidence, and audience? What are my initial observations about the effects of climate change in my special place?

In the first lesson, students brainstorm what feelings, concerns, and questions they have about climate change in small groups. They select a “special place” anywhere in the world to study in depth, writing about it with the support of sentence stems. They are also invited to interview their friends and family—ideally, who live or have lived in their special place—to explore the specific impacts of climate change on that place. In the second lesson, students learn about other youth engaged in climate change advocacy in their communities. They watch videos of two young people who are respectively located locally and globally. After each youth climate activist video, the teacher asks students in small groups to reflect on how the video made them feel, what was the core message, who is the audience, and why was climate change important to the young person.

In the third lesson, students are introduced to Photovoice by exploring example Photovoice texts about how climate is impacting specific locations globally. They then create their own Photovoice project using a photograph they bring or find of their own special places, focusing on the five core prompts. Students then share their special place Photovoice projects, marking each special place described on a global map to document the diversity of locations and impacts across the classes’ special places.

In the fourth lesson, students are introduced to writing data stories as a way to combine personal stories with scientific and data argumentation. The teacher introduces students to an example data story about a place special to them. This introduction intentionally shows how photographs can be combined with data tables and graphs to holistically communicate the emotional, scientific, local, and global dimensions of climate change (see Online Resources section for curriculum and examples).

Data: Exploring the causes and impacts of climate change (5E: Explore and Explain)

In this next phase (six class sessions, 50 min each), student pairs explore data tables, maps, and graphs of country-by-country CO₂ emissions, mean yearly temperature change, and poverty rates. Using these data sets and the Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP), students explore the questions: Who is most responsible for climate change? Who is most vulnerable to climate change? What does this mean for my special place? As a web-based, free data platform, CODAP enables students in grades 6–12 to analyze, interpret, and communicate with data by flexibly moving between data in tabular, graphical, and geospatial maps (see Online Resources about CODAP). One feature of CODAP that allows students to bridge the personal/local and collective/global dimensions of this investigation is the ability to highlight specific data points across these different representations (Figure 2). For example, a student can highlight the country corresponding to their specific special place on the map, exploring the country’s temperature anomalies, CO₂ emissions, and poverty levels. Students in a group can use this feature to then compare their special places easily or to investigate larger regions of interest within the global data set.

Figure 2: CODAP example demonstrating the interlinking of representations. Data points representing the highest carbon emissions are highlighted in the graph, and the corresponding countries highlight automatically in the map.

In the first lesson, students work in pairs to explore carbon emissions data, examining patterns across geographies and locating their special places within the map. Starting with the initial choropleth data maps of worldwide CO₂ emissions per person (Figure 3), students explore the question Who is most responsible for climate change? The teacher begins this exploration with a notice/wonder cycle (What do you notice? What do you wonder?; see NCTM resources in Online Resources), asking pairs of students to examine and share their observations from the data map and to connect these observations to what they know about the relationship between CO₂ emissions and climate change. Over the course of two days, students work to identify the largest emitters of CO₂ and to examine emissions data for their own special places and those of their peers. These data explorations are supported by an introduction video about data table, graph, and map functionalities (see Online Resources for additional CODAP introduction materials).

Figure 3: An example of a choropleth map that student pairs analyzed showing CO₂ emissions in metric tons per country, with lighter coloration representing lower carbon emissions and darker coloration representing higher carbon emissions.

Students are also supported to formulate their own questions within the data sets, with prompts such as, What are you curious about? What data will be useful to you? Do you think a map and/or graph will be helpful to answer your questions? In the next lessons, students are encouraged to continue to explore the data tables, maps, and graphs to answer the question, Who is most vulnerable to climate change? Here, students continue their global focus, this time exploring country-by-country–level data about poverty rates and temperature anomalies as different indicators of climate vulnerability. As with carbon emissions, students are encouraged to consider inequities in vulnerability on both the local and global scale through the lens of their special places. After these class lessons visualizing and analyzing the data using spatial choropleth maps, dot plot graphs, and raw data tables, students then spend time brainstorming and storyboarding their own data story, focusing on location, message, and audience as they begin linking together their insights from analyzing and interpreting data.

Action: Writing data stories and inspiring action (5E: Elaborate and Evaluate)

In this phase (six class sessions, 50 min each), students work with the qualitative and quantitative data that they had assembled thus far to author their own data story, pursuing the questions: Who do we want to talk to? What information do we want to share? How can we do something about climate change? They are prompted to identify a specific target audience (e.g., youth, policymakers, teachers, the public) and to consider what types of stories and evidence would be most effective to inspire or motivate their audience to act around climate change. They revisit the example data stories shared earlier in the unit, analyzing these examples with an eye toward these decisions around audience, evidence, and story. Prompts and graphic organizers further encourage students to focus on how they can leverage their personal stories, “special places,” and broader data investigations to communicate their findings and inspire their audience to action. Figure 4, for example, structures students’ final presentations around the questions: Why is your story important? What data do you have and what does it show/explain? What are your suggestions for change? What would you like your particular audience to do? The last three to four days of the unit are reserved for students to present their data stories, and those stories are assessed by peers and teachers using a rubric aligned with these questions (see rubrics for data stories and final presentations of data stories in Online Resources).

Figure 4: Cuba Data Story Paired Comparison Activity worksheet used by student pairs as they contrast their special places (Cuba, Guatemala) and the different layers of data and data visualizations that they analyze, visualize, and interpret.

Conclusion

In this article, we have outlined framework principles and a 5E curriculum progression that sought to support climate change learning attending to the personal, social, emotional, and historical dimensions. As science educators and curricular designers seek ways to meaningfully teach about climate change, it is key to support interdisciplinary approaches such as those described here. Such approaches center the personal connections and relationships with special places alongside global understandings of the causes and inequities involved in the crisis. At the same time, it will also be key for students to engage with existing public data sets in ways that capture the multiple dimensions of climate change, where they can understand not only what is but also imagine and advocate for what could be. •

ONLINE RESOURCES

Writing Data Stories Project—https://tinyurl.com/bde38frp

Writing Data Stories Curriculum Overview and Google Drive Links—https://tinyurl.com/5d6swd72

Public Climate Data Sets in CODAP (Spanish)—bit.ly/WDSClima

Public Climate Data Sets in CODAP (English)—bit.ly/WDSClimate

Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP)—https://codap.concord.org

Teaching with CODAP resources—https://codap.concord.org/for-educators/

Notice and wonder questioning routines (NCTM)—http://tinyurl.com/n6r7fzym

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the youth and educators, who we learned alongside in the development and enactment of the curriculum.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-1900606.

Notes on contributors

Kathryn Lanouette

Kathryn Lanouette ([email protected]) is an assistant professor in the School of Education at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Krista L. Cortes is Director of The Center for Hispanic Excellence (La Casa Latina) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Lisette Lopez is a curriculum developer in Western New York. Michael Bakal is a doctoral candidate and Michelle Hoda Wilkerson is an associate professor, both in the Berkeley School of Education at the University of California Berkeley.