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This Teacher Wishes Her Content Wasn’t Relevant

The Unique Challenges of Teaching About Environmental Injustice to Students Who Are Living It

Satina Ciandro’s environmental science students have experienced environmental injustice firsthand, which, paradoxically, makes it harder to teach about climate change.

On the one hand, it’s personal- offering baked-in relevance. On the other hand… it’s personal. Which means it’s also emotionally fraught.

“It took me 23 years of teaching science to really teach about climate change. Not just mention it, really teach it,” admitted Ciandro.

A Student Body Familiar with Inequity

Ciandro teaches science at Watsonville High School, located in a small city in the Monterey Bay Area of California. 96% of her students are Hispanic. 88% of her students are economically disadvantaged.

“Most of my students are students of color and they understand injustice very well,” said Ciandro.

In fact, many of her students were directly impacted last March when the Pajaro River Levee was breached, flooding homes in a low-income community primarily inhabited by migrant workers and their families. Needed repairs on the levee had been deferred by the Army Corps of Engineers when their cost-benefit analysis concluded the low home values in the area didn’t warrant prioritizing levee repairs.

Getting Past the Paralysis

The breach is just one example of environmental injustice Ciandro’s students have faced. A 2021 Environmental Protection Agency study indicated, “…the most severe harms from climate change fall disproportionately upon underserved communities who are least able to prepare for, and recover from, heat waves, poor air quality, flooding, and other impacts.” Racial and ethnic minority communities are particularly vulnerable, they stated.

Ciandro’s hesitancy to really go deeply into climate change stemmed in part from recognition that discussing yet another example of environmental injustice would be triggering for her students. She worried her lessons would be all doom and gloom.

Ciandro also worried about her lack of perspective. How could she teach about an experience she had not had?

“I am a white lady… I don’t know what they are living through,” she said.

Getting it right felt insurmountable.

Over the past few years, Satina has picked up a few trauma-informed strategies that help her feel more comfortable delving into the science of climate change and all of its messy ramifications. She’s learned that providing time and space for students to process things that are emotionally triggering is imperative. Ciandro incorporates art, journaling, and other forms of reflection into her science instruction.

She’s also learned that focusing on solutions helps reduce the doom and gloom factor.

“You can’t just point out the injustice and not do anything about it,” Ciandro said.

A recent study revealed 59% of young people ages 16-25 were “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change, a phenomenon increasingly known as eco-anxiety. Some eco-anxiety can spur people to action; too much eco-anxiety can have the opposite effect, leading to despair and inaction.

Having students take steps to help solve the problem can be empowering and can reduce anxiety. She cautioned, however, that you need to explore solutions in a way that does not put all the burden on the students to figure it out.

“That’s the point of the whole lesson- not to make you feel bad, but to consider what are the solutions, and how are we going to do the things to fix it?”

Striking the Balance with Urban Heat Islands

Recently, Ciandro applied these trauma-informed strategies in an urban heat islands unit. Ciandro was inspired to take this angle by Dr. Tammie Visintainer when she participated in her National Science Foundation-funded Climate Justice Action Research Summer Program at San Jose State University. The cohort of participating educators are all using urban heat islands as a lens to investigate climate justice with their students.

Urban centers tend to be hotter than surrounding rural areas. Materials like brick and pavement absorb and hold onto more heat than vegetation. This creates “islands” of heat. As the climate changes, heat-related deaths have also increased. Heat-related deaths in the United States spiked 59% between 2018 and 2022 according to the National Center for Health Statistics. People in cities are at higher risk of heat-related ailments.

Ciandro knew from her program that even within the cities, however, the effects of heat are not felt equally. Urban areas with fewer trees get hotter. Urban areas with lower tree density usually have two other things in common: high minority populations and historical subjection to redlining. Redlining was a practice carried out by lenders to create policies around who they would lend money to.

Certain districts were “redlined”. Mortgage lenders marked them in red on the maps, which meant they were coded as “hazardous.” Banks would not give mortgages to people buying homes in redlined districts. The rationale listed for assigning a specific neighborhood rating often cited race.

In nearby San Jose, California, for example, agents specifically noted one of these two reasons: “inharmonious racial concentration” or “heterogeneous” for five of 12 districts rated “hazardous.”

“When I went through history class in my white suburban school, I never learned about redlining. I did not know that it was on purpose and that it was systemic. I didn’t know. I know it’s not an excuse, but I’m learning with them,” said Ciandro.

Ciandro wants to make sure her students do learn about redlining. She designed a two-month long, project-based unit around the urban heat island phenomenon. Within the course of her unit, she wanted her students to discover the temperature differences; do some experiments to determine what factors affect temperature in our built environment; uncover the correlation between the 1930s neighborhood ratings and heat; and to take action to make a change.

How Tuva was Able to Help

Ciandro found that premade graphic visualizations about urban heat islands are easy to find, but she wanted students to be able to explore and manipulate the raw data themselves. Discovering a relationship on your own as you tinker with data makes a bigger impression than observing it on a premade graph. Ciandro’s go-to program for data exploration is Tuva. Ciandro has been a loyal Tuva user for many years and uses at least one Tuva activity per unit in her environmental science course.

Ciandro immediately went to Tuva in search of a relevant dataset but was disappointed to find we did not have one. After a conversation with us this summer during which she expressed a need for a dataset about urban heat islands and redlining, Tuva team member Annette Brickley curated one. She located a 2020 research paper by Hoffman, Shandas and Pendleton from Groundwork USA. When Brickley reached out to ask for permission to use the data on Tuva, Hoffman generously shared their complete dataset. Tuva’s dataset pulls out data from seven of the U.S. cities included in Hoffman’s paper.

Later, Ciandro used Tuva’s Activity Builder to create a lesson that would help her students explore the dataset and discover relationships between neighborhood grade, tree canopy, impervious surfaces and temperature. The story the data tells is pretty bleak, but Ciandro manages to infuse hope at the end of the activity.

Box plot showing that neighborhoods given ratings of C and D in the 1930s are hotter today than those that were rated A or B.

“Imagine you are a city planner and your job is to allocate funds for a major climate action grant,” she writes. “How will you distribute the funds to each type of neighborhood? Justify your answer using data.”(We liked her activity so much, we published it. Access it here.)

Ciandro’s students also collected data across the Watsonville High School campus. Each group selected two spots, collected surface temperature data once per week, and entered the data on Tuva. Through this exercise, they observed locations near concrete were consistently hotter than green spaces.

Student Empowerment

As the unit neared its end, four of Ciandro’s students – Jazmyn, Mario, Rocio and Anail- gathered around a Zoom meeting to tell me about their learning experience.

“I did not realize how impacted our little city is because it is so based on concrete,” noted Anail. “My (part of the) city is in the red line,” she added.

The other students agreed with Anail that the last few months have been eye-opening. Until this unit, they did not know urban heat islands existed let alone that extreme heat is worst in areas that were historically redlined. The other thing they agreed on was that everyone else in Watsonville should be made aware of the problem too. Jazmyn laid out her hopes for her community.

“I want them to get a better idea of how it actually affects us in our daily lives, I want them to not feel negative because there are solutions to it, and I want them to come together as a community to plant more trees,” she said.

As a culminating project, student teams created podcasts to help educate their community. The podcasts, which they plan to submit to the KQED Youth Media Challenge, played the dual role of helping students process injustice and giving them a way to fight back against it. (Want a sneak peek before they’re live? Listen to Jazmyn and Mario’s submission here.)

Teaching Tough Topics: “Something We Need”

Ciandro says teaching tough topics helped her grow as a teacher.

“It helped me as an educator to teach something that is tough to teach. It is a different way of teaching, and it’s something we really need,” said Ciandro.“You have to do your best and hope you are going to do more good than harm.”

Data Visualizations Make the Invisible Visible for Hands-on Learners

A strand of human DNA is a mere 2.5 nanometers wide. To put that in perspective, a sheet of printer paper is 100,000 nanometers thick. It’s no wonder high school microscopes are not powerful enough to enable students to view DNA! That poses a challenge for high school biology teachers, though. Anything at such an infinitesimal scale is abstract. It’s quite the trick to teach about how structure relates to function for something none of the students have ever seen.

High school science teacher Catia Wolff recognizes the need to make genetics more concrete for her students. This is especially true because of the population of students in her classes.

“Our school attracts students that prefer working on hands-on projects rather than a traditional setting,” explained Wolff.

Wolff teaches at the Rockland BOCES Hudson Valley Pathways in Technology Early College High School, more commonly referred to as Hudson Valley P-TECH. The program is part of the larger New York State P-TECH Program initiated a decade ago with dual goals of preparing students for high-skill, high-wage STEM jobs and ensuring employers have access to a talented and skilled workforce. Students who complete the program at Hudson Valley P-TECH graduate with both a high school diploma and an associates degree at Rockland Community College. The school tends to draw students with a talent for and affinity toward working with their hands.

Hudson Valley P-TECH attracts students who are hands-on learners.

Wolff carefully selects and sequences lessons to make genetics more tangible. Her process starts with three-dimensional modeling. She gives her students a DNA sequence. Students create a complementary DNA strand. Then they model the processes of transcription and translation, simulating how a cell carries out protein synthesis.

After completing this process, Wolff found her students were still struggling to understand how all the cells in our body can have such drastically different characteristics while housing identical DNA. They didn’t understand what gene expression means. They needed something more. What Wolff did next did not surprise P-TECH Guidance Counselor Allison Paul.

“Tuva caught my eye right away. Students can see it, they can manipulate it. They can do it. They’ll say, ‘Look what I made!’”

“She is always learning. When most teachers just want to take the summer off, she is taking a course. She is constantly learning and constantly trying to improve,” said Paul.

Instead of adding in a lecture, reading or video, Wolff began searching for resources that would cater to her students’ learning style. What she found was Tuva’s activity Genes: To Express or not to Express? That is the Question.

The activity uses a dataset curated from The Human Protein Atlas, a Swedish-based program with the aim to map all the human proteins in cells, tissues, and organs. Tuva’s dataset includes 35 different genes, the function of the proteins they code for, and whether or not those genes are expressed in the tissues that make up the eye, skeletal muscle, stomach and tongue. During the activity, students look for patterns of gene expression and hypothesize an explanation of the results.

“They had to figure out the puzzle. It made them really think. It really sparked conversation,” said Wolff

This dot plot shows the genes expressed in two different tissues: skeletal muscle and stomach. It has tissue type on the x-axis and gene name on the y-axis. The legend shows the function of the proteins created by the genes. Students can see that four genes are expressed in skeletal muscle that are not expressed in stomach tissues.

Throughout the course of the activity, students use Tuva’s drag and drop graphing tools to create visuals that help them compare the tissues and puzzle out why some tissues express certain genes while others do not. Wolf observed that having a model, a graph that students could actually see and manipulate, helped them comprehend how DNA connects to cell function.

“Tuva caught my eye right away,” Wolff explained. “Students can see it, they can manipulate it. They can do it. They’ll say, ‘Look what I made!’”

Reforging Human Connection Post-Pandemic… With Data

Schools across the nation report student behavior, engagement and academic performance have all dipped below pre-pandemic levels. In fact, one Stanford University study found that chronic absenteeism has doubled, jumping from 15% in the 2018-19 school year to 30% in the 2021-2022 school year. The reasons for this decline are complex and much-debated. Regardless of the cause, as educators, what do we do to motivate students?

“What I find works the best is you getting to know who they are and them getting to know who you are. Then they start wanting to do better,” said Doug Page, a veteran algebra one and AP statistics teacher at the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology in San Francisco. “It takes a while,” he admitted.

Page’s approach is not a new one. In 1985 psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci introduced the Self-Determination Theory of motivation. Their research found that relatedness, autonomy and competence are three major drivers of human motivation. Their findings challenged Skinnerian behaviorism and changed the way educators approached student engagement. Less carrot/stick, more connection.

A Clever Way to Get Acquainted

Page has found a creative way to get to know students while simultaneously introducing them to some basic statistics- collecting data. During the first few days of his AP Statistics class Page disseminates a Google survey. Students answer a variety of questions about themselves. (Try it out here.)

Some of the questions are demographic in nature. How far do you travel to get to school each day? How many siblings do you have? Other questions focus on personal habits and preferences. Do you use social media? How many texts did you send yesterday? What sports do you play?

Page opens the data in a Google spreadsheet, removes student names so the data is anonymous and uploads the data to Tuva. He shares the data with his students via Tuva. Then, students can quickly ask and investigate questions about their class. In this way, Page gets to know his students, acquaints them with Tuva’s graphing tools, and introduces some foundational statistics concepts.

Unfiltered graph showing correlation between texts sent and texts received.

Filtered graph showing a correlation between texts sent and texts received.

Page used texting data from the student survey to teach about linear regression. Tuva’s simple filter tool enabled him to easily demonstrate how outliers can skew the data.

Page continues to use Tuva for a variety of assignments throughout the year.

“Sometimes I want to spend the time analyzing the data, not doing all the mechanics. The mechanics are a time sink. What I love about Tuva is that it is so drag and drop. You can do so many things so quickly.”

The Bigger Picture

Not only has Tuva enabled Page to connect with his students, it has also helped him harness data about school wide indicators of student engagement, such as tardiness and absenteeism, and use it to problem solve. For example, when Page noticed high levels of tardiness during first period classes, he began to collect data. He uploaded the data into Tuva, shared it with colleagues, and launched a productive conversation about how to improve first period attendance.

Teaching is a hard profession, but it’s never a dull one.

“Students always say, ‘Isn’t it boring teaching the same thing for 25 years?’” Page said. “But while the material stays the same, the people change. I tell them, it’s not you sitting in the same seat everyday.”

Page said it is these ever-changing personalities and the opportunity to connect to each kid and find out what motivates them that keeps him going.

Want to Try It?

After you make a getting to know you survey using Google Forms, it’s easy to import your own data into Tuva from the Google Spreadsheet it generates. Visit Tuva’s support section or click this link to learn simple steps for uploading your data in Tuva.

HS Chemistry Students Uncover Well Water Contamination

Student Data Shows Unsafe Arsenic Levels in ME Wells

An alarming 10% of Maine’s private wells are contaminated with arsenic, and many of the people who drink from those wells are unaware¹. It’s likely that around 38,000 Mainers unknowingly ingest private well water with arsenic above the Environmental Protection Agency’s maximum contaminant levels. That’s because only 56% of wells in Maine have been tested for arsenic. ²

Students in Jon Ramgren’s high school chemistry class are helping change that. Since 2018, Ramgren’s classes have tested more than 350 wells in the vicinity of Waterville Senior High School in south-central Maine. 16% of the wells his students have tested contained unsafe levels of arsenic, a known poison and carcinogen.

The ME Department of Environmental Protection deems arsenic levels greater than 10ug/L unsafe.

Ramgren was one of the first teachers to join All About Arsenic+, a school-based citizen science initiative begun in 2015 by Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory and Dartmouth College’s Toxic Metals Superfund Research Program. Students have tested thousands of wells in Maine and New Hampshire as part of this project, which is funded by a National Institutes of Health Science Education Partnership Award.

“We are getting real-world data that no one has; we are adding to data that is limited, “ said Ramgren.

All sites on the map represent wells that hadn’t been tested for arsenic prior to the project. Data points in bright yellow show the locations where water samples were collected by Waterville students.

One important aspect of this project is helping students build data literacy. The program identified Tuva as the right partner to help their students explore and analyze the data they have collected and to make the data publicly available. Through the All About Arsenic + project data portal on Tuva, students can access all of the project data or can filter it to show only their school’s results.

“Most of the time in high school science,” Ramgren explained, “you are doing labs that are kind of meaningless in the sense of larger scientific data. No one is interested in the data some kid got about the density of copper.”

In contrast, interest in well water data has been high. Ramgren said test results have spurred some homeowners in his area to install arsenic-removing filters. The Maine Center for Disease Control and Maine lawmakers have been paying attention too.

“You can gather real information as a citizen scientist and actually contribute even if you are ‘only’ a high school student.”

In 2022, data collected by participants in the All About Arsenic program convinced the Committee on Labor and Housing to double their request for funding allocated to well water remediation³.

“It’s real data that people are using to inform public policy,” said Ramgren. “You can gather real information as a citizen scientist and actually contribute even if you are ‘only’ a high school student.”

Engaging in citizen science is more time-consuming than using canned labs and textbooks, but Ramgren said the extra time is worth it. Amongst the benefits lauded by Ramgren are stickier learning, authentic problem-solving as students wrestle with how to act upon the data, and a stronger understanding of the nature of science. Collecting and analyzing real-world data, students get a more accurate picture of how professional scientists experience data – with lots of variability, background noise, and messiness. Because creating graphs by hand is so time-consuming, students are often only asked to make graphs when there is a correlation between variables. As a result, students may erroneously expect there will always be a correlation.

But it’s important for students to realize graphs showing a lack of correlation are equally important. The All About Arsenic dataset that’s housed by Tuva includes 28 attributes, or variables. Students can use the Tuva tools to quickly make and explore multiple graphs- both those that show correlation, and those that don’t.

Ramgren is also hopeful that real-world data collection will help students avoid another misconception that plagues our society- the notion that science ideas are absolute and unchanging.

“Science is not static. We are constantly getting new information,” Ramgren said.

He thinks altering the way we teach science can help kids recognize science knowledge is subject to revision and improvement in the light of new evidence. When we have students redo experiments for which the answer is already known, we reinforce the impression that we know everything in science already. However, if students are actively adding to scientific knowledge, they will understand its fluid nature.

MDI Biological Laboratory. “All About Arsenic+.” All About Arsenic, 2023, https://www.allaboutarsenic.org/sepa/. Accessed 31 October 2023. ↩︎
Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention & Maine Department of Health and Human Services. “Private Well Water | Maine Tracking Network.” Maine Tracking Network, 2021, https://data.mainepublichealth.gov/tracking/private-wells. Accessed 31 October 2023. ↩︎
Viles, Chance. “Westbrook students’ science project makes impact in Augusta.” The Portland Press Herald, 1 March 2022, https://www.pressherald.com/2022/03/01/westbrook-students-science-project-makes-impact-in-augusta/. Accessed 31 October 2023. ↩︎

Fostering Systems Thinking in the Middle Grades

Foley Teaches Complexity Using Multivariate Graphs

Downpours in Uruguay, but drought in Peru. Enormous blizzards in the northeast, but steeply climbing worldwide temperatures. Climate science can be confusing… especially if you’re only 14 years old. Without an understanding of complex systems, it can seem downright contradictory.

That’s why Maura Foley, an earth and climate science teacher at the Hopkins School in Connecticut, devotes significant energy to helping her students investigate systems interactions.

“Today’s problems are complex problems, so we need thinking that is going to reach outside of these discrete zones of understanding,” said Foley.

Foley admits that understanding complexity is part of higher order, abstract thinking – an easier task for her high school students than her middle school students. However, she believes it’s essential to begin building the idea of complexity in the lower grade bands. In her middle school courses, the process of building that understanding starts with noticing how one thing affects another, which affects another, and so on.

“Today’s problems are complex problems, so we need thinking that is going to reach outside of these discrete zones of understanding.”

“What’s great about Tuva is being able to blow through looking at a whole bunch of variables quickly,” explained Foley. “They don’t need to be a spreadsheet expert to quickly go ahead and make 10 graphs.”

Foley uses Tuva activities and datasets consistently throughout her Surface to Space class in 8th-grade. Each dataset includes multiple, interconnected variables that students can drag and drop onto the axes to explore correlations.

October Weather in US Cities Datset Image — New England Ice-Out Dates, Global Change and October Weather in US Cities are a few Tuva datasets Foley’s students use to explore complex earth and climate systems.

When students first use Tuva, she said there tends to be some oohs and aahs as they watch the dots rearrange themselves. Then, Foley starts to hear students verbalizing the patterns they observe.

“Those observations are able to keep going and going because it’s not like I’ve handed them a simple graph,” said Foley.

Graph Showing Positive Relationship Between Humidity and Particulate Matter — This graph, created by an 8th-grader in Foley’s class, investigated the relationship between particulate matter and humidity.

Foley has observed that once students notice one relationship, they begin to wonder if other variables are related. Tuva allows them to quickly and easily satisfy their curiosity. It starts a deeper conversation in which students begin to comprehend the complexity of Earth’s systems.

In addition to middle school science, Foley teaches a high school elective: Engineering Nature. In this higher level class, Foley expects her students to apply their understanding of interconnectedness to tackle pressing issues, such as climate change. Last year her students made biogeochemical terrariums and tracked CO₂ concentrations over time. Then they geoengineered the terrariums to reduce the CO₂ concentrations.

Foley’s emphasis on interconnected systems when these students were in the middle grades prepared them to take on this rigorous geoengineering challenge. In the long term, Foley‘s students will be prepared to face the complex problems of a complex world.