Workshop helps professors and students better communicate about climate change

Participants in workshops held at University of São Paulo's Oceanographic Institute in Brazil learn to use teaching methods based on scientific questions and hands-on science classroom activities.

By Elton Alisson  |  Agência FAPESP – How can university professors explain the impact of climate change on the oceans to undergraduates in a more interesting and interactive way rather than by merely presenting a text or images on the subject? How can high school students be helped to understand the relationships between the oceans and the climate, such as heat transport, through simple experiments that can be performed in the classroom?

Some ideas were put forward by US researchers from the University of California (UC) Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz during workshops held on March 20-22, 2017, at the University of São Paulo’s Oceanographic Institute (IO-USP) in Brazil.

The event was organized as part of “Global learning for local solutions: Reducing vulnerability of marine-dependent coastal communities” (GULLS), an international project supported by the Belmont Forum, a collaboration of some of the world’s foremost agencies funding environmental change research, including FAPESP. 

The aim was to improve the participants’ communication and teaching skills with regard to climate change and the role of the oceans in this change.

University professors, undergraduate and graduate students, instructors, technicians and guides from museums and science popularization centers attended day-long workshops combining guidance on how to teach using scientific questions with hands-on practical science demonstrations.

“An exceptional number of people enrolled, and interest in participating in the workshops was expressed by people from different subject areas, such as biology, physics and geology, working in schools, museums, universities and research institutions,” said Maria Gasalla, a professor at IO-USP who organized the event, in an interview given to Agência FAPESP.

“These professionals were all in search of practical ways to explain climate change and its impact on the oceans and coastal communities to the general public so that people think more about the issues involved.”

According to Gasalla, workshops are the main activity organized by the educational component of GULLS.

Beyond Brazil, scientists from Australia, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom belong to the GULLS network, which works to characterize, evaluate and project the future of marine resources in order to identify adaptation options and strategies to enhance the resilience of coastal communities to climate change.

The project focuses on five regional hotspots of climate and social change, defined as fast-warming marine areas and areas experiencing social tensions as a result of change. These areas require urgent attention and serve as “natural laboratories” for observing change and developing adaptation and management strategies that can be replicated in other parts of the world. 

The five marine and coastal areas selected for study are all in the southern hemisphere: southeast Australia; Brazil; India; South Africa (Benguela system); and the Mozambique Channel in the western Indian Ocean, with the countries of Mozambique and Madagascar adjacent. 

“We included an educational component in the project because we believe the science of climate change and its impact on the oceans has to start being included in the school curriculum and university syllabus. Until now, it’s hardly been covered at all,” Gasalla said.

“The workshop is designed to help participants think about activities and strategies that can be used in the classroom in a simple manner to link and discuss these issues.”

Evidence-based practices

Similar events to the Brazilian one had already been held in South Africa and Australia, also by specialists from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.

UC is a member of the GULLS consortium, and its Berkeley campus includes a science museum and a science diffusion research center. Called the Lawrence Hall of Science, the center develops and disseminates model programs for teaching and learning science and mathematics. According to the institution, its materials are used by over 7.6 million school and university students in the US and worldwide.

“The aim of workshops like the ones we held in Brazil is to offer climate- and ocean-related teaching and learning experiences and strategies based on research as well as classroom materials that can be used to teach science using effective practices and evidence-based methods,” said Adina Paytan, a research professor at UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences and one of the workshop instructors.

“During the workshops, we propose dynamic teaching methods and examples of how to explain science to the general public so that the participants can communicate more effectively,” Paytan said in her opening words at the event.

In one of the proposed activities, the researchers asked the participants to say what kind of aquatic environment Brazilian fish species such as the sardine (Sardinella brasiliensis) and the mullet (Mugil liza) live in and what they eat, for example, and to describe their morphological traits, such as the shape of the tail, body and mouth as well as color patterns and any spots or other distinguishing features.

This activity was designed to encourage the participants to think about the broader context for the impact of climate change on the oceans and their living residents as well as on the human communities that depend on them.

“Our intention was to use these educational workshops to expound on the strategies, materials and experiences available to researchers at UC; to show how the link between climate change and the oceans is taught abroad; to see what can be useful to us or adapted to our culture; and to stimulate the production of ideas for our own classroom materials that can be used in a simple way in secondary schools and undergraduate courses as well as places that don’t have science labs, for example,” Gasalla said.

“Initially, we wanted to listen to what the three different target groups at the event had to say so that we could then see whether the activities proposed were valid and effective for their practices.”

One of the workshop participants was Piero Alateri Dias, a third-year undergraduate in the oceanography course at IO-USP.

“What aroused my interest in the event most of all was the chance to improve my educational skills because I plan to be a teacher in future,” he said. “If knowledge about climate change and the oceans is better conveyed to society, people will know more about ecosystems and how they work, and they’ll be more environmentally aware.”