National Association of Geoscience Teachers Pacific Northwest Section Winter 2007 President Ralph Dawes, Earth Sciences Department. In this Issue: Wenatchee Valley College 1300 Fifth Street , Wenatchee, WA 98801 Crisis in Washington (D.C. & State!): [email protected] Global Warming Education Vice President 2007 PNW NAGT Annual Meeting, Portland Ron Metzger And more! Southwestern Oregon Community College 1988 Newmark Avenue, Coos Bay, OR 97420 [email protected] Secretary/Treasurer Robert Christman Department of Geology Western Washington University From the President Bellingham, WA 98225 [email protected] Newsletter Editor Cassandra Strickland Yakima Valley Community College Do you teach climate change? It is a topic that spans 500 W. Main, Grandview, WA 98930 [email protected] disciplines in earth science education and is taught in many classes. Climate change State Councilors comes up in physical and historical geology textbooks in the glaciers and ice ages AK Cathy Connor, Univ. of Alaska chapters and it comes up in meteorology classes when climate is the topic. It comes up Southeast, Juneau in the news media just about every day, usually referred to as global warming and [email protected] Michael Collins couched in terms of climate change today and tomorrow. News articles tend to focus [email protected] on how climate change affects, or is affected by, people. Most students have thus been ID Shawn Willsey, exposed to the topic and may already have opinions about it. This exposure makes College of Southern Idaho [email protected] climate change an extended “teaching moment,” a rich opportunity to build from OR Joe Graf topical interest to deeper understanding of science. Southern Oregon University [email protected] Tom Lindsay How do you teach climate change? I once arranged for students to have in-class Portland State University debates on topics such as global warming. Such activities tend to receive plaudits for [email protected] being outside the box (i.e. not a lecture), student-directed, and so on. However, I BC Brett Gilley Douglas College found that, despite my efforts to format and direct the debates, the winning debate [email protected] teams rarely resorted to science, logic, or verifiable evidence; instead, they resorted to Mary Lou Bevier, University of British Columbia rhetoric and appeals to emotion, and on that basis they usually won their audience [email protected] over. Similar results were reported in a recent paper in the Journal of Geoscience WA Joseph Hull Education 1. What the authors of that paper and I have found is something that many Seattle Central Community College [email protected] philosophers and scientists have known at least since the time of Plato: in the public Jeff Tepper marketplace of ideas, sophistry can trump rigorous research, rhetoric can run circles University of Puget Sound around facts. In science, the real debates are the ones that happen in the pages of peer- [email protected] reviewed journals, and I think most would agree that is the level to which we should Past President Andrew Buddington, Science Dept. MS 2070 direct student thinking. Spokane Community College 1810 N Green St., Spokane, WA 99217 My own awareness of climate change affecting the modern world began with learning [email protected] about how greenhouse gases raise the temperature of the troposphere, and learning Web-site editor about Keeling’s measurements of tropospheric CO 2, which showed a clear and Jennifer A. Thomson, Department of Geology - SCI 130 accelerating increase. From those two facts, I could draw my own conclusions. I still Eastern Washington University start there when teaching about global warming, and have yet to see those facts Cheney, WA 99004 challenged in scientific terms. I like to have classes download ice core data from [email protected] 2 Vostok , turn it into graphs of temperature vs. age and CO2 vs. age, and compare the OEST Coordinator two graphs to see how they correlate. I also have students add more recent Davene Meehan [email protected] measurements of the amount of CO 2 in the atmosphere to the age-vs.-CO 2 graph, which plots at a much higher value than seen in the data for the previous 420,000 NAGT President (national) Scott Linneman, Geology Department years. Western Washington University Bellingham, WA 98225 [email protected] Continued on Page 2 Page 1 NAGT Pacific Northwest Section SECTION NEWS Continued from Page 1 Outstanding Earth Science Teacher When I saw “An Inconvenient Truth,” I had mixed feelings about seeing Al Gore’s dramatic way of presenting similar 2007- Nominate Today! data. The movie largely consists of Mr. Gore giving a lecture Davene Meehan, PNW NAGT OEST Coordinator on global warming. His presentation is primarily based on Make a pre-college teacher's day--nominate them! Please what many climate change studies have been reporting, get the word out to your school districts and get those including an explanation of how greenhouse gas raises the Outstanding Earth Science Teachers (OEST) nominated! temperature of the troposphere, and how burning fossil fuel raises the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, Awards are given to middle school and high-school teachers. particularly CO 2. My ambivalence kicked in when, during his Eleven national finalists are selected, one from each NAGT PowerPoint presentation, Mr. Gore gets on a hydraulic lift regional section. The Pacific Northwest region covers beside the slideshow screen, to be lifted up alongside the rise Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Idaho, British Columbia, and on the age-vs.-CO 2 graph to its present-day levels. He the Yukon. Individuals may apply themselves or nominate a incorporates the same data my students graph into the most colleague for the award. dramatic PowerPoint presentation I have ever seen. The “…get those juxtaposition of him being lifted up beside the rising redlined The prizes are incredible: a curve is a sophisticated rhetorical flourish. 10"x13" laser-engraved Outstanding Earth Science Teachers Should we strive for this kind of lecturing? Yes and no. After solid walnut plaque, a two- all, we want to keep our students engaged and focused. year complimentary nominated!.. NOW! ” Rhetorical flourishes have their uses, and on a more modest membership in the NAGT, a scale than Al Gore, many of us try to jazz up our lectures in three-year complimentary various ways. However, when it comes to using classroom membership in the Geological Society of America (GSA), time to advocate for political, economic, or lifestyle change, $500.00 in travel funds and $500.00 in classroom my impression is that the answer is no for most of us. It improvement funds, both from GSA (winners must request Dictionary of Geologic derails our efforts to get at the facts, to use science to achieve these two money awards), choice of a Terms Geotimes the best possible measurements and explanations of reality. or subscription to , one-year subscriptions to Earth in Space The Professional Geologist There is an old struggle in science and science education and , one-year of between being objective and using what can be verified, and membership in the National Earth Science Teachers Earth the tendency to discount or discard facts or lines of inquiry Association (includes a one-year subscription to the Scientist) that don’t support our preconceived notions. This struggle , a set of slides from the National Center for takes place within our minds, within our classes, and within Atmospheric Research, a CD-ROM and poster from Joint our profession. Oceanographic Institutions/U.S. Science Advisory Committee, AND an assortment of publications from the Given the power of rhetoric, I’m afraid the idea that objective United States Geological Survey. science will always triumph is a dream that resides in the realm of Plato’s ideas, whereas we are people tangled up in The official nomination form can be downloaded at: the real world. I believe our goals as educators should be to http://nagt.org/files/nagt/OEST.pdf . Because we are all so stay balanced in our presentations of science, be advocates of busy these days, however, you can just email me a name and research, and be open to where the research leads. Is this contact information. I will be happy to get those nominations possible when teaching climate change? flowing! The form can look overwhelming--remember the important information that needs to be given: teacher’s name, Dr. Ralph Dawes phone number, address, email, school name, a paragraph Wenatchee Valley College covering reasons for the nomination, the nominator’s Wenatchee, Washington information, and signature. P.S. There seems to be something in the air! Read on for other The deadline is April 1st ! Get started NOW! State winners articles related to climate change in this issue. will be announced June 1st and section winners on September 1st .This is a great way to get the word out about our own organization, make contacts with other geoscience teachers, References and find out what secondary teachers are doing in the 1. Clayton, D.S., and Gautier, C., 2006, Scientific classroom. I am excited and want LOTS of nominations! Send argumentation in earth system science education. Journal names or forms to of Geoscience Education, volume 54, #3, pages 374-382. [email protected] or Mrs. Davene Meehan, 423 Koontz 2. Petit, J. R. et al., 1999, Climate and atmospheric history Road.Oak Harbor, WA 98277. of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok Ice Core, Antarctica. Nature volume 399, pages 429-436. Nominate, nominate, nominate!!! Page 2 NAGT Pacific Northwest Section SECTION NEWS Section Website-- browsed lately?? field class we will examine the volcanic geology in the wake Jenny Thomson, EWU of the Yellowstone hot spot as the North American plate moved westward during the last 20 million years.