Carbon’s Fate in a Changing World: A Collaboratively Developed High School Curriculum Module on How Carbon Moves Through Air, Sea and Ice

Our team will present three years of progress towards the development of a new high school curriculum module to investigate the changing ocean carbon cycle. Active collaboration between educators and oceanographers at the University of Washington (UW) in consortium with Systems Education Experiences (SEE) at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) began with a five-day teacher workshop on the fate of carbon in the ocean, ice, and atmosphere. This project was conceived to inspire new ideas and approaches for three-dimensional learning opportunities aligned with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). The result is a cohesive set of novel, interdisciplinary instructional materials that guide students through using hands-on labs, data and oceanographic tools to trace carbon movement. Eight high school science educators from the Puget Sound area learned from and worked with five oceanographers in the Polar Science Department of the Applied Physics Department at UW. Next small teams of scientists and educators crafted materials over three years. In a culminating workshop during the summer of 2019, teachers and scientists reviewed and optimized materials. Post-workshop, two teachers incorporated recommendations and finalized lesson plans, teaching aids, and online web curriculum. Instructional materials feature problem-based thinking and data visualization tools such as Ocean Data View (ODV) and World Ocean Circulation Experiment Electronic Atlas of Data (eWOCE) to access publicly available time-series data to answer relevant questions about changes within a particular system. Materials will be freely disseminated broadly and teachers will be supported as they implement this real-world, three-dimensional NGSS learning in marine science and interdisciplinary STEM courses.