Many teachers across the Garden State have been spending their summer days this year learning more about global warming. The ultimate goal is to integrate the information that they have learned into their curriculum for the upcoming school year.
At the Meadowlands Environment Center in Lyndhurst, NJ, teachers gathered for a week-long workshop centered around how to give meaningful lessons to students, ranging from K to 12, regarding climate change. This goal was set by the New Jersey Department of Education in 2020 and is now starting to be implemented more and more throughout the state.
The N.J. Department of Education knows that this is a difficult mission to take up, but feels that it is essential for children to learn more about this topic through other types of curriculum outside of science-based classes. The N.J Department of Educations is providing $5 million in grants to train teachers by establishing Climate Change Learning Collaboratives, which are to be used by colleges and universities.
For teachers in North Jersey, Ramapo College runs the collaborative at the Meadowlands Education Center. For the central areas of the state, Rutgers and Monmouth are in charge of the region, while Stockton University deals with the South.
The workshop was led by Dr. Angela Cristini, a professor of biology at Ramapo College and the director of the Meadowlands Environment Center. Cristini emphasized that the Earth is heating at a rapid pace to inform the teachers of the severity that comes with teaching climate change.
The workshops included multiple different experiments and demonstrations to provide participants with a physical representation of what is and happening and might continue to happen if global warming is not taken seriously. With the new school year rapidly approaching, teachers will begin to take what they have learned from the workshop and integrate it into their curriculum to provide students with crucial information regarding climate change.