Introduction
We face many challenges from the effects of global warming. Consensus of scientific opinion is that the Earth's climate is being affected by human activities. These activities are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents that upsets the balance of absorbance or scattering of radiant energy from the Sun, thus causing the Earth to heat up.
To facilitate students to reach a level of understanding of this complex environmental problem, one must teach the science behind the greenhouse effect. This unit will explore the atmosphere and all its components, properties, and processes. Students will also gain a better understanding of the chemistry involved with the major air pollutants and the atmosphere. This unit will give the students a better understanding of the atmosphere and how the human experience affects atmospheric processes.
By using the issue of global climate change, the students can see how the delicate balances of the Earth's biogeochemical cycles are important to all biota. Our society is burning the global supply of fossil fuels, which formed over a 300 million year period, in only a few hundred years, a blink of geologic time. The input of sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon rivals the overall flow of nature. This human-induced global warming is currently happening and has strong momentum to continue in the foreseeable future. Our global society and ecosystems are currently affected by this warming and the impacts are felt in almost all aspects of the environment.
Although there is less consensus of the scientific community as to the details of the outcomes of global warming, there is however, ample research and evaluation as to the extent of greenhouse warming and its potential impacts in peer-reviewed and published scientific literature. Students will be exposed to the potential impacts derived in this literature and engage in critical thinking exercises to tie these potential impacts to their local environment. Students will evaluate findings of relationships between current observed biological changes and human activities.
The intended audience for this curriculum unit is 9 th grade vocational students enrolled in my Environmental Landscape Technology Program. These students will spend the last nine weeks of the course engaged in this unit as a survey of the types of skills and topics that will be addressed in their career and technical education for the remaining three years of their high school experience. This unit would lend itself well to any environmental science class. I have the luxury of time within my curriculum, since students are enrolled in my program for three plus years in a block-scheduling situation. This nine-week unit is a great survey of many aspects of the environment and analyzes the problems that may arise with further greenhouse warming. This sequence would be a true environmental science class and would really engage students whereas on a whole, environmental science has become an elective science that is of the "rocks for jocks" mentality and not rigorous or thought provoking. Environmental science is not a secondary and useless science: it is the real application of many aspects of science and is very multidisciplinary in nature. Many science and mathematics concepts seem to make no sense to students since they cannot see the relevance to their application. Through the context of environmental science, students can see relevance to biological and physiological processes, chemical reactions and mathematical calculations and interpretation. I hope that you will be able to implement some of the brain-based pedagogy of this unit into your environmental science class to improve the engagement of your students and to also put some real science into your classes. I think of my classroom as a catalyst for intrinsically motivating students on the environment. I strive to do this by developing relevant and engaging curriculum units which is ultimately how to increase the students' understanding of content and empower students with the ability to analyze information and develop their higher order thinking skills.
The unit and individual labs will be based upon the learning cycle model which is based on scientific inquiry. Students are encouraged to develop their own understanding of a scientific concept, explore and deepen their knowledge and understanding of the concept, and then apply the concept to a new situation. The method breaks down into three different phases in the learning process. The exploration phase is the first introduction to the topic and is done in small collaborative groups without any direct instruction from me; the role of the instructor is to facilitate the process by asking questions and observing. Students are given physical materials or some sort of information (graph, data, article) with which they are to solve a problem with the help of my questioning. The hope is that the students reach a state of disequilibrium in which they formulate questions and hypotheses from their observations. The second phase is concept development. Within this part student groups share their observations, pose questions, and share their hypotheses derived from the experience. My role is to then provide definitions and explanations to student's experiences in the exploration phase, tying a meaning to the prior experience they just had. This will introduce and develop the scientific concept that is the objective of the lesson. The final phase is the concept application phase; this is when you facilitate another small group experience that places the concept in another situation in which the students must use their experiences and the information gained during the concept development phase to solve another situation or problem. An example of a learning cycle lesson is included as part of the appendix.
Being a vocational instructor, I see first hand the importance of active discovery of skills and content information, compared to passive reception of information in a lecture context. This rings true and can be performed in a classroom setting. This is further enhanced with hands-on vocational skills that are part of this unit. The hands-on activities that are incorporated into this unit mimic the actual tasks that a research scientist or environmental field technician would do as part of their job. This puts the students in practical learning situations that are relevant to the learning and most times brings about an intrinsic motivation for learning the content. The data collected by my students will be uploaded to the NASA G.L.O.B.E. website (www.globe.gov) via the Internet, which also helps with the motivation, since they are engaging in an international data sharing project. Students can appreciate the data they will be analyzing much better if they have actually collected some data in the field themselves. Having students analyze data throughout the unit helps develop creative and critical thinking skills that are usually not developed in normal classroom instruction. There are only three examples of lessons used in this unit included in this document due to space restrictions. There are however, tens of lessons embedded throughout the narrative explanation of this global warming unit and the web links to use to access the activities via your computer are included in the teaching resources section of the unit.
The first day of the unit, students are given a schedule of the weekly topics and are placed into research groups that will research and present to the class how global warming will affect their assigned aspect of the environment each Monday during the third through ninth weeks of the unit. The student groups will be given a binder that includes journal articles, Internet resources, and other information on the specific topic. Student groups will read through and decipher the information in the binder as well as "researching the research" on the web to develop a multimedia presentation to kick off each weekly section of this unit. The students will be given a rubric indicating the minimum requirements for the presentation but have quite a bit of creative license when developing their presentation. This project will be done out of class time and will be the responsibility of the research group. We are fortunate that the students are able to stay after school for extra help on Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout the year and are provided with transportation home. This also helps build a group dynamic and overall good work ethic since students are required to interact and take responsibility for learning outside the classroom.
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