UC Santa Cruz

Teaching about climate change and its impacts, like precipitation extremes, requires linking complex science concepts with consequential issues of justice for both human communities and natural ecosystems. However, teachers have few professional learning opportunities or curricular resources that address the intersection of science and sociopolitical systems content with a justice lens. In this article, we describe the design of a five-day summer institute for PK-12 teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area that was developed by a large team of teachers, informal educators, environmental justice activists, scientists, and education researchers. We present the conceptual framework for our design, a set of environmental justice lenses, and highlight three activities from the institute that focus on local impacts of precipitation extremes in urban environments, all of which can be adapted to different grade levels and teaching contexts. We also describe our iterative design process and approach to collaboration and evaluation, including revisions that we made to these activities in the successive year to better support our learning goals for teachers.