COLLEGE PARK, MD (May, 2016) Dr. Randy McGinnis of the Department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership presented research connected with Project MADE CLEAR at the Climate Action 2016 forum held at the University of Maryland on May 4, 2016. The forum was held as a public conference to support Climate Action 2016, a worldwide summit that was co-sponsored by UMD and took place over the next two days in Washington, D.C.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, MADE CLEAR brings together climate science and education experts at the Universities of Maryland and Delaware to provide support to those states’ teachers. Focusing on middle and high school, the project provides science teachers with training, resources, and online content for use in the classroom. The educational goal is to empower teachers and university faculty with the resources needed to teach climate science. From a research standpoint, the project investigates students’ conceptions of climate and teachers’ implementation of climate science education.
Dr. McGinnis’s research on climate science education has never been so obviously relevant than at Climate Science 2016, convened in the wake of the historic COP21 conference in Paris, which highlighted the urgency of reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. Attending the summit in D.C. were representatives of 25 leading research universities, including UMD, that comprise the Universitas 21 consortium.
“Pursuant to our land-grant mission to put knowledge into practice, our faculty, students, and staff from various academic disciplines met with leaders from the governmental, business, finance, non-profit, and civil society sectors,” said University of Maryland President Wallace Loh. “Together, they sought solutions to the existential challenge of our era – mitigation of, and resiliency to, global warming.”
Dr. McGinnis’s made his presentation on MADE CLEAR during the forum’s first session, entitled “The Role of Academic and Research Institutions in Climate Implementation.” He presented groundbreaking empirical research on climate change education that employs a learning progression perspective informed by sociocultural factors. Sitting on the panel with Dr. McGinnis were Dr. Ron Benioff, director of the Low Emission Development Strategies (LEDS) Global Partnership; Dr. Luis Cifuentes, an associate professor of engineering at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile; Dr. Anand Patwardhan of the Climate Implementation Research Network; Dr. Amy Luers of Future Earth; and Mark Stewart, senior project manager at the University of Maryland’s Office of Sustainability. The panel was moderated by Dr. Lennart Olsson, director of the Center for Sustainability Studies at Lund University.
Click here to learn more about Project MADE CLEAR.
Dr. J. Randy McGinnis is a professor in the department of Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, where he founded and previously directed the Center for Science and Technology in Education. In addition to teaching science education, he was the principal investigator for the Maryland Collaborative for Teacher Preparation, a mathematics and science teacher education program, and the director of Project NEXUS, which studied recruitment, preparation, and retention of upper elementary and middle school science teachers. Currently, Dr. McGinnis is the UMD principal investigator (subledger grant) for Project MADE CLEAR (Maryland and Delaware Climate Change Education Assessment and Research). He holds a Ph.D. in science education from the University of Georgia and two master’s degrees from Teachers College of Columbia University.
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