Smithsonian Education Conference Blog: Climate Change

National Museum of Natural History, Climate Change, and Sharing Great Science via Web 2.0

My name is Carla Bitter and I am the new Chief of Outreach at Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History (NMMH). This is an incredibly exciting time to be a part of the technological transformation of our culture in terms of how people gather, share and experience science information. It is a great honor to be at the forefront of these strategic changes for our museum, for science, and for our understanding of the world around us. Most importantly, I am so pleased to be able to share the vision of NMNH regarding climate change as a driver in our scientific understanding of human evolution, of biodiversity, of geology and even for cultural and societal change. Ideally conferences like this will lead to better decision making for all of us through enhanced access to current scientific research and perspectives. The future of sharing the best science research seems limitless!

Carla Bitter is the Chief of Outreach at the National Museum of Natural History.

Going Behind the Scenes with Smithsonian Researchers

As a new staff member at the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, I am just getting to know the resources it offers to teachers. I’ve learned, for example, that the publication Smithsonian in Your Classroom has been around since the bicentennial year of 1976. (It was then called Art to Zoo). The print version is mailed to elementary and middle school in the country; a PDF version is downloadable from SmithsonianEducation.org. It’s a great way for teachers to connect their students to the work of the Smithsonian—students who might never have an opportunity to set foot in a Smithsonian museum. And as I discovered last week, when the new issue arrived, it is also a way to have a pretty cool educational experience with a friend or two.

I read the issue aloud to my friend Christopher. Titled "Prehistoric Climate Change (and Why It Matters Today)" it tells the story of Smithsonian paleontologist Scott Wing, who has been searching for plant fossils from a time called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), 55 million years ago. During the PETM, global temperatures rose dramatically as a result of natural carbon-dioxide emissions. Scott’s work is now “relevant” because of parallels to our own time of rising carbon in the atmosphere.

Climate Change “Finds” of the Week – Part Three

Below is my latest list of climate change “finds.” This week I am including links to both Smithsonian and external resources that might be of interest to both educators and other conference participants. They include the Conference Hashtag for Twitter. Check out the conversation going on there! Remember, many of us will be tweeting throughout the live conference, so start following us to get ready!

• Conference Hashtag on Twitter - #SIClimate
• United Nations Environment Programme – "Paint for the Planet"
• A disaster simulation game from the UN/ISDR – "Stop Disasters"
  (For upper-level students or skilled game players, this complex game lets you see how choices affect the environmental health in different geographical regions.)
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – “IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4)”

Feel free to comment on these items or post any relevant items that you find!

Taking Climate Change Personally

I teach at a junior high school in Missouri and attended a Smithsonian Day event as the Missouri Teacher of the Year in 2008. I subsequently won the Smithsonian’s 2009 Increase Award for innovation in teaching teachers how to use Smithsonian resources. When I think about global warming, my thoughts turn to Glacier National Park in Montana. Our entire family spent about a week in the park in 1986, when I was 15, and the highlight was hiking to Grinnell Glacier. We walked on the glacier, felt the river of icy water melting beneath it, and marveled at the views from the Continental Divide. We still look at the photographs and laugh about how much fun we had on that hike.

Fifteen years later, I returned to Glacier National Park to propose to my wife. We hiked the same trail I had as a teenager. But things had changed. When we reached the top, Grinnell Glacier was much different than I had remembered. It was now 2001 and global warming had started to take its toll. The ancient ice mass had become noticeably smaller, and we learned that it was continuing to melt at an accelerated rate. Grinnell Glacier is vanishing before our eyes.

Scientists had predicted the glaciers will vanish from Glacier National Park by 2030. Two years ago that estimate was revised to 2020. Think about it - Glacier National Park without glaciers. The average daily temperature in the park has increased two degrees each year. Glacier National Park is visibly showing the impact of global warming.

Teens Discover “Green Ways to Move the Mail” at the Postal Museum

We receive mail at home and at work six days a week but rarely consider the impact the postal system has on humans and the environment. The U.S. mail travels by truck, bike, mule train, or Segway (PDF), whether along dirt roads or super highways, to reach the densest city neighborhoods and scattered rural ranches. Figuring out the “greenest” way to get it there is a challenge that the US Postal Service (USPS) takes seriously. It’s also a challenge that the Smithsonian National Postal Museum turned over to a group of thirteen-year-olds.

Teens supervise the “invention lab” where museum
visitors try to create a “green” mail delivery vehicle.
The “test driver” in the lab coat makes sure the vehicles
are up to speed on the following criteria: safety,
reliability, speed, and cost.

The 15 “green teens” took charge of planning the Green Ways to Move the Mail Family Festival during a workshop in March 2009. Even the unflappable teenagers were impressed by the sheer size of the postal system on which we depend for birthday cards, coupons, Pottery Barn catalogs, and Netflix. With the world’s largest civilian fleet, USPS drives more than 1.2 billion miles each year. In 2007, USPS delivered to 147,992,522 addresses, and two million addresses are added annually. Despite recent drops in mail volume, the vast system that moves our mail has dramatic impact on the environment.

Teens can recycle their bulk mail or read magazines online, but none of us can immediately affect how mail gets to our door. So the focus of the Festival was not our personal behaviors. Rather, the program used mail transportation as a challenge to teach systems thinking, team work, problem solving, and interdisciplinary knowledge. By teaching others during the festival, teens honed their communication skills and tested out a day in the life of a museum educator.

Climate Change "Finds" of the Week - Part Two

As a follow up to last week’s “Climate Change “Finds” of the Week” post, below is my latest list of climate change “finds.” This week I am including links to both Smithsonian and external resources that might be of interest to educators.  They include the Philip Merrill Center, which I visited on a memorable field trip with my AP Environmental Science class during senior year of high school! What do you think?

• National Zoological Park, Migratory Bird Center – "Do Birds Make a Difference?”
• "Cool" School Challenge – Take the challenge!
• Global Change Research Program Educator Resource – “Climate Change Wildlife and Woodlands – A Toolkit for Formal and Informal Educators”
• Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Headquarters – The Philip Merrill Center
• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History – “Thinning Ice, Acid Seas: Climate Change at the Poles”

Feel free to comment on these items or post any relevant items that you find!

Jarrid Green is a former Smithsonian intern and recent college graduate from the University of Maryland.

Protest, Patriotism, and Climate Change

Looking at old photographs and seeing a younger self’s style choices often leads to a horrified “What was I thinking?!” Looking at your old publications can be much the same experience, but I was happily surprised and even proud when I recently reread Protest and Patriotism: A History of Dissent and Reform, which I developed at the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies in 1992. Written in collaboration with Lonnie Bunch, then at the National Museum of American History and now the director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the guide offered new approaches to the study of the populist, civil rights, and environmental movements and to protest in general. It includes historical case studies that emphasize each movement’s origins or catalysts , the people who created or joined the movement, the tactics they used to effect change, the responses by government and other institutions to the movement, and the movement’s long-term achievements.

So, did we say anything seventeen years ago about “environmentalism” that is still relevant today or, at least, relevant to this conference on climate change? I think so, particularly in illuminating how our society responds to major challenges. One of the things I learned from working with Lonnie Bunch on this project, and that he articulates in the introductory essay, is that successful reform movements in the United States have been peopled and led by members of the middle class. But the very same middle-class composition that leads to success usually ensures that the reform is limited and moderate, because “this class of citizens has much to benefit from and to protect within the current system.”

Climate Change "Finds" of the Week

One of the cool things about working on the upcoming conference is that every day my research unearths some pretty intriguing articles, exhibits, blogs, and other media related to climate change. Unsurprisingly, several come from the Smithsonian.

I get the chance to share such items with colleagues in my office, but I also want to create posts here so others can check out these resources. Thus, below is a list of my favorite finds of the week.

• Smithsonian Science Blog - "Study aims to give endangered Shenandoah salamander better odds at survival"
• Smithsonian magazine's Surprising Science Blog - "Weather vs. Climate"
• Smithsonian magazine's Surprising Science Blog - "Climate Change in Your Backyard"
• Smithsonian Marine Station at Fort Pierce - "Virtual Tour"
• National Museum of the American Indian - "Mother Earth"

Feel free to comment on these items or post any relevant items that you find!

from Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States,
a new report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program, USGS

Jarrid Green is a former Smithsonian intern and recent college graduate from the University of Maryland.

Engaging Students with Technology

I’m Jeff Meade, the School and Tours Coordinator at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum. I spend quite a bit of time leading tours through the museum, turning students into airmail planes and letter carriers and Pony Express riders and things like that. Museum education intrigues me but leaves me wondering about some pretty big questions. First, how effective are my offbeat, even wacky, lessons, and two, can some of the ideas I use on the museum floor translate to classrooms all over the country? I’ll try and tackle both of those questions in promoting dialogue about Climate Change.

The Smithsonian National Postal Museum’s central
exhibit tells the story of how the mail moves—
by plane, train, truck, and even dog sled!

I have found that collections relating to our natural and built environments often create a call for action, especially when we discuss topics like climate change with our audiences. Because there is no specific answer to what we should or should not do to address such an issue, I think it opens the door for creative engagement strategies like those I use at the Postal Museum. Climate change as a topic lends itself quite well to interpretation strategies I promote at the Postal Museum, mainly because there is no specific answer on what we should or should not do. In terms of tour strategy, lacking specific answers opens the door for creative engagement. Learning strategies I employ on tours, for students of all ages, encourage artistic, musical and theatrical interpretations. As wacky as they might first appear, these strategies encourage multiple ways to understand our themes and promote multi-sensory learning moments. Seriously, students are always taking in information, but do we as educators really provide enough creative outlets for them to interpret back to us what they know?