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NOAA Announces New Environmental Literacy Grants

Oct 30, 2014

NOAA's Office of Education is pleased to announce awards authorized for a total of $1,541,569 over three years to five institutions as part of the Environmental Literacy Grants competition for Building Capacity of Informal and Formal Educators. These five awards support two collaborative projects: Advancing Climate Literacy through Investment in In-service and Pre-service Science Educators (ACLIPSE) and Carbon Networks: Using Local and Regional Datasets, Visualizations and Narratives to Build Educator Capacity about Ocean Acidification and Global Change.

The Advancing Climate Literacy through Investment in In-service and Pre-service Science Educators project will leverage NOAA assets including the NOAA-funded curriculum Ocean Sciences Sequence for Grades 6–8: The Ocean–Atmosphere Connection and Climate Change, data from NOAA-supported ocean, estuarine and atmospheric observing networks, and NOAA-affiliated scientists. The goal is to design and implement a complementary suite of materials, courses and workshops for university teacher educators to use with middle school in-service and pre-service teachers. The project builds capacity of formal science educators by providing: (1) opportunities to become knowledgeable about global environmental change and real-time data; (2) exposure to different climate knowledge systems through place-based connections with the ocean through technological and/or indigenous observing systems; and (3) materials and expertise to apply their learning to teaching practice in a long-term, sustainable manner. The awards that support this project were made to the following institutions:

Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California Berkeley
Western Washington University

The three-year project started on October 1, 2014.
The Carbon Networks: Using Local and Regional Datasets, Visualizations and Narratives to Build Educator Capacity project will address the disconnect between scientific evidence and the public's understanding of the impacts of ocean acidification and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The project will develop and implement professional development for informal and formal educators in the use of authentic ocean and atmospheric data to create meaningful place-based education narratives and activities about these impacts. It will bring together three diverse, informal education partners in a collaborative project to co-design educator professional development workshops and implement training programs in their respective institutions. By connecting local ocean and atmospheric data with that of regional, Pacific and global systems, Carbon Networks creates a new approach to understanding global environmental change by relating it to the local environments that are most relevant to people's lives. The awards that support this project were made to the following institutions:

Exploratorium
Pacific Science Center
Waikiki Aquarium at the University of Hawaii-Manoa

The three-year project started on September 1, 2014.
"NOAA's Office of Education is pleased to support and partner with these significant organizations," said Louisa Koch, director of education at NOAA. "We are excited about the potential of both projects to build the capacity of formal and informal science educators to use and interpret NOAA's wealth of scientific data in order to raise the level of environmental literacy of their student and public learners, an important effort strongly connected to NOAA's mission. We look forward to seeing the goals and objectives of each of these projects fully realized."

These awards were made through the Environmental Literacy Grants for Building Capacity of Informal and Formal Educators Federal Funding Opportunity (Number: NOAA-SEC-OED-2013-2003614). Additionally, there were four awards previously funded under this opportunity.