7570 Views (as of 05/2023)
  1. Anne Gold
  2. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  3. University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado Film School
  1. Erin Leckey
  2. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  3. University of Colorado Boulder
  1. David Oonk
  2. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  3. University of Colorado Boulder
  1. Lesley Smith
  2. Presenter’s NSFRESOURCECENTERS
  3. University of Colorado Boulder

Lens on Climate Change

NSF Awards: 1513320

2016 (see original presentation & discussion)

Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, Undergraduate, Graduate

The Lens on Climate Change project is a engages middle and high school students in producing short videos about climate change topics in Colorado, specifically ones that are impacting students’ lives and their local community. Participating schools are located in rural, suburban and urban Colorado, many of which have diverse student populations, often from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. University graduate and undergraduate students and community college students mentor middle and high school students in research and video production. With the help of these mentors, student groups select and research climate topics, interview science experts and stakeholders, and produce videos.

The program aims to engage students in self-motivated research and learning about a climate topic. Furthermore, it serves as a way to spark students’ interest in a career in science by matching them with college students for the program duration and bringing them to a university campus for a final screening event. Evaluation results show that the process of video production is a powerful tool for students to explore and learn about climate change topics. This approach of teaching science with videography in an active, self-directed style can easily be transferred.

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Discussion from the NSF 2016 STEM For All Video Showcase (25 posts)
  • Icon for: Anne Gold

    Anne Gold

    Lead Presenter
    Research Faculty
    May 16, 2016 | 07:08 p.m.

    Hi – welcome to our video! We are excited to present our recently funded NSF project with you. This video is about a school-year long intervention we did as a pilot project. We are adding a summer-camp type, 1 week intensive workshop this summer targeting rural Colorado. We have two great groups this summer but faced some challenges initially when selecting partners. We would love input on how to best address and select rural communities for projects in the future.

  • Icon for: Victor van den Bergh

    Victor van den Bergh

    Facilitator
    Project Manager
    May 16, 2016 | 08:50 p.m.

    Dear Anne and your team – This looks like a great way to engage middle and high school students in learning about climate science and expose them to relevant career options. It was impressive to see how you were able to help students learn additional technical and interpersonal skills in the process of making their videos and learning about these topics. I also appreciate the emphasis on developing relationships with mentors at universities, which is something that can be extremely challenging to accomplish. What advice or lessons learned would you share with others who may be seeking to incorporate mentoring between undergraduates/university professors and K-12 students in their programs? Thank you for your excellent video!

  • Icon for: Lesley Smith

    Lesley Smith

    Co-Presenter
    May 17, 2016 | 09:58 a.m.

    Hello Victor, thank you for your post! Can you please elaborate on your question? In what ways do you think this type of collaboration may be challenging – recruiting mentors and training them, developing partnerships between universities and K-12 students, or something else. We want to make sure we answer the question you are asking. Thanks.

  • Icon for: Victor van den Bergh

    Victor van den Bergh

    Facilitator
    Project Manager
    May 17, 2016 | 10:18 p.m.

    Hi Lesley,
    The video suggests you were able to recruit numerous graduate and undergraduate mentors from your University for the project, and it is clear from Jordan’s interview that the mentors were invested in the project and passionate about working with younger students. This was very moving to see! I would be curious to know about both topics you raised: how did you go about recruiting volunteers, and how did you develop the partnerships?

  • Icon for: Lesley Smith

    Lesley Smith

    Co-Presenter
    May 18, 2016 | 12:05 p.m.

    Hi Victor,
    We are fortunate that our institute, CIRES, has the foresight to start an outreach program long ago, and we now have quite a robust of individuals in our group and through grants from NSF and others we have been able to develop a lot of long-standing partnerships with school districts and teachers over the years. We are known throughout Colorado through participating in the Colorado Science Education Network (I am not Chair of the Steering Committee), as well as nationally via our various networks and professional societies. Developing partnerships is all about building relationships with districts, schools or teachers and meeting their needs, rather than focusing principally on your or your institute’s needs. It takes time and effort, but in the end it’s well worth it! One of our LOCC teachers, shown in the interview, participated in my PD program for 3 years, I visited his school several times and he’s now on our advisory board for LOCC. As far as getting mentors to volunteer (we do pay stipends, which helps), we’ve also been recruiting mentors for many years for various programs, and I’ve been a PI or co-PI on two NSF-funded GK-12 programs which has proven helpful in this way. Grad students are looking for these types of opportunities to put on their resume because the job market is so competitive. We, of course, vet them through an application process and such, but we’ve had no problem recruiting grad student mentors. The undergrad mentor is a new focus, and we will see how this goes in the next year. Hope this helps!

  • Icon for: Erin Leckey

    Erin Leckey

    Co-Presenter
    May 18, 2016 | 02:23 p.m.

    Hi, Victor.

    Just to add a bit to what Lesley said with regard to mentors, we have gotten great response just by having our partners put the word out to campus list-servs. The program we got the most mentor response for was the summer, week-long program at our campus (as opposed to those that require travel to a more rural community). I take from this that students want to help, but it has to be convenient and limited enough in scope that they can be sure that it works into their schedule. I think that the stipend helps a lot, but I don’t think it’s the primary motivator for most of our mentors.
    Thanks for watching the video and submitting questions!

  • Icon for: Victor van den Bergh

    Victor van den Bergh

    Facilitator
    Project Manager
    May 19, 2016 | 09:50 p.m.

    Hi Lesley and Erin, Thank you both for your very thoughtful responses. They illuminate how much is going on “behind the scenes” here (excuse my pun) and how hard you work at developing good partnerships. Good luck with the next phase! Thank you.

  • Icon for: Karen Purcell

    Karen Purcell

    Facilitator
    Project Director
    May 17, 2016 | 11:59 a.m.

    Hi Anne, Erin, David, and Lesley,
    Fantastic! I really love this project – particularly the ownership that the students seem to be taking in their projects and the follow-through with mentors at universities. The potential impact seems huge!
    Do you have any impact results specifically regarding underserved students? Also where there differences in impact between urban, suburban, and rural schools?
    Finally, do you plan to scale this up nationally? How could this be done? There is so much potential!

  • Icon for: Anne Gold

    Anne Gold

    Lead Presenter
    Research Faculty
    May 17, 2016 | 05:19 p.m.

    Hi Karen,
    Thanks for your nice comment. Teachers from the schools with the students that come from diverse backgrounds (>90% Free and Reduced Lunch) described the strongest impact on the students. Those students particularly connected well with the mentors – viewing them as role models. Teachers described that many students don’t have many role models in their lives and really benefited from the relationship they were able to build.
    While we worked with urban, suburban and rural students in the pilot it is too soon (sample sizes too small) to report differences beyond anecdotal evidence.
    We believe that the program is scalable. We will be working with teachers on lesson plans and support materials to help implementation at a larger scale.
    Thanks for your great questions.
    Anne

  • Icon for: Karen Purcell

    Karen Purcell

    Facilitator
    Project Director
    May 19, 2016 | 12:24 p.m.

    Fantastic. Thanks for your reply Anne! It’s really exciting to hear about the strong impact in underserved schools. Can’t wait to see where you take it next.

  • Icon for: Brian Drayton

    Brian Drayton

    Co-Principal Investigator
    May 17, 2016 | 01:19 p.m.

    I am curious whether you find some climate skeptics among your students, and how they contribute to the unfolding of projects. IN a project we have here in Mass., even in famously “liberal” communities a substantial fraction (~25-40%) of students say that the don’t believe there’s any change happening, nor do their parents.In a project such as yours, such a variation might actually be valuable as a learning opportunity!

  • Icon for: Anne Gold

    Anne Gold

    Lead Presenter
    Research Faculty
    May 17, 2016 | 05:25 p.m.

    Hi Brian,

    Great question. Yes – we are seeing this in Colorado also. Especially in the rural communities where the economy depends on oil and gas extraction. In fact we offered a workshop in one rural community in Northeastern Colorado for this summer and didn’t get much interest. Teachers reported back that the parents were very skeptical because of the climate topic. There appears to be an initial barrier when talking about climate because the topic is so controversial.
    In our project we are encouraging the students to select the topics themselves, identifying how climate affects their communities – in Colorado that can be drought or wild fires or flooding. These topics appear much less controversial than when broadly talking about climate because those are effects that can be observed and impact communities.

  • Vicki Hand

    Guest
    May 17, 2016 | 02:12 p.m.

    Hi Anne and co-presenters,
    This is great work you are doing with students locally around issues of climate change! Is there a chance the video can be shown at some of the local elementary schools? Not only would it be interesting for the elementary kids, but it may inspire them to pursue STEM futures as well.

  • Icon for: Anne Gold

    Anne Gold

    Lead Presenter
    Research Faculty
    May 17, 2016 | 05:28 p.m.

    Hi Vicki,
    Thanks for your comment. Yes, showing these videos at some local schools is of course possible and might be a nice opportunity for the middle and high schoolers to talk about their films in a low-pressure environment.
    If you have concrete ideas which schools to target or schools who might be interested send me an email.

  • Vicki Hand

    Guest
    May 19, 2016 | 01:17 p.m.

    Hi Anne, I imagine that most of the schools in BVSD and St. Vrain might be interested in showing a video or two in their classrooms as part of a science unit. You might want to align the videos with the science standards, so the teachers have some idea about where they fit in their curriculum.

  • Icon for: Joni Falk

    Joni Falk

    Co-Director of CSR at TERC
    May 19, 2016 | 04:58 p.m.

    Love this project and the fact that middle and high school students are putting together videos as part of their learning. Just as in this project “The Video Showcase” I think there is a change as to how people will communicate science and video will become more and more important. How long are the videos that the students create? Can I view them somewhere? How much help do middle schoolers need to collect footage, put together a narrative and edit to a coherent story? How many videos were created. I would love to hear more as this is very related to my own interests. Thanks for sharing this!

  • Icon for: Anne Gold

    Anne Gold

    Lead Presenter
    Research Faculty
    May 19, 2016 | 07:03 p.m.

    Hi Joni,
    Thanks for your comments and good questions – the videos will be between 2-3 min. In our pilot we set a limit of 5 min and the videos ended up being 5-7 min (which starts to be long). We have some videos from the pilot project on our website: http://cires.colorado.edu/outreach/LOCC/
    The first videos produced under this funding will be developed in June. Each group creates one video through this project. Middle schoolers were pretty technology savy and had great ideas. They did need help with the details of shooting B-roll but learned quickly. If you want to learn more please contact our team via email and we can share more insights.

  • Icon for: Joseph Wilson

    Joseph Wilson

    Facilitator
    Managing Director
    May 19, 2016 | 07:58 p.m.

    #teamAnne – I LOVE the engagement of students as active learners and doers to understand climate change better. Given a resource constrained environment that may not have access to graduate students and mentors directly, how do you think your approach could be adapted? (I’m excited to look at the student videos in the link above!)

  • Icon for: Erin Leckey

    Erin Leckey

    Co-Presenter
    May 20, 2016 | 11:02 a.m.

    Thanks for the question. One of the things we are exploring with the research side of this project is which people are most influential to students’ success in the project. We suspect that the mentors and staff we are providing are a big part of it, but it may be that the students themselves, their parents or other members of the community are as important or more important. That’s a long-winded way of saying that just because you don’t have grad students, etc. in your application of the project, doesn’t mean it can’t be very successful.
    One of the outcomes for this project will be some guidance on how to adapt the project for use in a variety of setting. It is really important to our team to make all aspects of this project very accessible and adaptable. Once we are a little further into the project we will have a better idea of how to do that. Stay tuned!

  • Icon for: Lesley Smith

    Lesley Smith

    Co-Presenter
    May 20, 2016 | 01:05 p.m.

    We also have a published book chapter that describes the steps of our project, along with other types of media projects one can do with students, with suggestions of how others can do this without all the resources we are able to use in LOCC. Smith, L.K., A.U. Gold, J.N. Roonery-Varga, D.J. Oonk and D. Morrison. 2016. Media literacy as a pathway to bridge the digital and STEM divides: Interest driven media projects for teachers in the trenches. In: Improving K-12 STEM Education and Outcomes through Technological Integration. M.J. Urban and D.A. Falvo (eds), pp. 23-43. IGI Global, Hershey, PA.

  • Icon for: Teresa Eastburn

    Teresa Eastburn

    Digital Learning & UCAR Connect Lead
    May 20, 2016 | 02:08 a.m.

    Kudos Anne, Erin, Leslie, and David! Where have I been?! As someone who makes a lot of videos and lives her professional life (and a lot of her personal) around the issue of climate change, you’d think I’d be in the know about a great program a stone’s throw from NCAR. When I see you next I’ll get caught-up as I have lots of questions and interest in what you’ve done and how far along you are. Good luck this week with your submission! Great job! — Teri

  • Icon for: Erin Leckey

    Erin Leckey

    Co-Presenter
    May 20, 2016 | 10:55 a.m.

    Thanks, Teri! We’d love to chat, especially with our like-minded neighbors.

  • Icon for: Lesley Smith

    Lesley Smith

    Co-Presenter
    May 20, 2016 | 01:07 p.m.

    Thanks Teri – we will be happy to answer your questions!! You could come over during our summer workshop if you’d like. Send me an email to get details.

  • Sarah Wise

    Guest
    May 23, 2016 | 11:21 a.m.

    Wow! Great job on the video, LOCC team. I’m honored to be a part of this project.

  • Icon for: Shabnam Etemadi

    Shabnam Etemadi

    May 23, 2016 | 07:58 p.m.

    This is excellent! What’s the criteria for students to be able to join the program and to gain a mentor?

  • Further posting is closed as the event has ended.