14
BAMOS
Mar 2020
Workshop report
Climate Across the Curriculum
Developing school teaching resources at the AMOS National Conference
Ian Macadam (on behalf of the “Climate Across the Curriculum” team)
Contact: [email protected]
Given the importance of climate change and its high profile,
particularly among young people, it is perhaps surprising
that there are real challenges in teaching climate science in
secondary schools. Leaving the politics of climate change aside,
these include a dearth of educational resources tailored to the
needs of teachers, and, depending on the school subject being
taught, limited space in the curriculum for climate science.
This year’s AMOS conference in Fremantle provided an ideal
opportunity to work towards overcoming these challenges.
Secondary school teachers were invited to join a dedicated
group of conference attendees the day after the conference to
participate in a “Climate Across the Curriculum” workshop.
The aim of the workshop was to contribute secondary school
lesson plans on climate science to an international repository
run by TROP ICSU project (https://tropicsu.org/). TROP ICSU
(“Trans‑disciplinary Research Oriented Pedagogy for Improving
Climate Studies and Understanding”) is a global project funded
by the International Council of Science. It aims to improve
understanding of climate science by providing educators with
teaching tools and lesson plans. TROP ICSU collates and curates
a collection of these teaching resources so that teachers in
schools and colleges/universities across the world can use them
to introduce examples and case studies from climate science
and climate change to their teaching. The TROP ICSU team
promotes the use of workshops to develop lesson plans to
help teachers incorporate climate change examples into their
teaching of the curriculum of existing school subjects. It was a
meeting between members of the TROP ICSU team and Robyn
Schofield (University of Melbourne) in Pune, India that ultimately
led to the building of a “Climate Across the Curriculum” team in
Australia to run a workshop at the AMOS 2020 conference.
Once the 60 workshop participants had found their seats, new
AMOS President Angela Maharaj introduced the workshop
and speakers Vaille Dawson (UWA) and Marion Cahill (Catholic
Education Office of WA) set the scene on how climate science
relates to secondary school teaching. Participants then divided
themselves into groups of 2–9 individuals seated at round
tables. Tables were labelled with different school subject and
level, either school years 7–10 or 11–12.
The “Climate Across the Curriculum” team:
Angela Maharaj 1,2 , Robyn Schofield 2,3 , Ian Macadam 1,2 ,
David Holmes 4 , Sanaa Hobeichi 1,2 , Linden Ashcroft 2,3 and
Vaille Dawson 5 .
1. Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney
2. Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes
3. University of Melbourne
4. Monash Climate Change Communication Research
Hub
5. University of Western Australia
Each group was charged with developing a lesson plan for the
school subject and level displayed on their chosen table. Sanaa
Hobeichi (UNSW) then guided the groups through a structured
lesson plan development process. This was aided by a shared
Google workspace pre‑populated with lesson plan templates.
This allowed the groups to record ideas for their lesson plan,
structure them in a way that could be easily communicated
and assimilated into the TROP ICSU repository and, importantly,
ensured that the work was captured and could be developed
further after the workshop.
After a few hours of energetic engagement between the
teachers and climate scientists, lunch was served...but the
work did not cease! As the participants ate, they were treated
to three talks, each addressing one of the three cross‑cutting
priorities of the Australian curriculum: “Asia and Australia’s
Engagement with Asia”, “Sustainability”, and “Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures”. These themes are
often challenging to teach, and the talks were designed to help
teachers by providing some ideas for content. Robyn Schofield
addressed “Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia” with a talk
focussed on the importance of the Japanese Himawari weather
satellite to Australia, including during the recent bushfires.
Roger Dargaville (Monash University) addressed “Sustainability”
by showing how basic physical laws and the maths associated