Sameer Honwad, Assistant Professor of STEM Education, travels to Bhutan

Assistance from the CIE development grant helped me travel to Bhutan, in order to continue my ongoing work on environmental decision-making and formal curriculum design to support sustainable decision-making processes among youth in Bhutan. The trip was also meant to build partnerships with the environmental science faculty in Bhutan and to explore the possibility of designing a cross-cultural collaborative learning environment for undergraduate students at UNH and the Royal Thimpu College in Bhutan

Weaving strands of knowledge: Leaning about environmental change in the Bhutan Himalayas

Climate change is a complex phenomenon, so much so that even those with expert knowledge on the scientific data struggle to understand the impacts of climate change on their everyday lives. Contradictions across systems of knowledge make clear that climate change is not just a problem of scientific understanding but is also simultaneously a problem of global coordination as well as a sociopolitical problem of connecting domains of knowledge that are seldom valued equitably. The project described in this paper is a prototype effort to put knowledge from community members in two culturally distinct rural areas of the world at equal footing with scientific knowledge. The overarching project aim was to design partnership-based inquiry into environmental and climate change that coordinated the aforementioned three facets of climate change (a) scientific understanding, (b) cross-cultural coordination among globally dispersed communities, and (c) sociopolitical equity in bringing nondominant perspectives to the table

Can We Picture Equity? Critically Examining Cross-Cultural Short-Term Project Collaborations

This paper explores equity challenges common to short-term cross-cultural research partnerships. We focus on a project-based activity in which U.S. undergraduate students and college faculty taught middle-school students in Goa, India how to make podcasts about complex environmental problems. Project team members conducted a collaborative auto-ethnography focused on questions of power, leadership, collaboration, and equity, and examined exit-interview photo elicitation data to identify the core challenges of ethical and equitable short-term cross-cultural research and programming. Our use of photographs as conversation prompts helped to highlight contradictions and asymmetries along axes of power, cultural imperialism, knower-knowledge, age, race/ethnicity, social class, and gender. We reflect on possibilities for educational research that rejects a “voluntourism” model and moves, if imperfectly, toward more equitable international collaborations

A Culturally Relevant Teacher Professional Development for Teaching Climate Change to Native American Students

The science of climate change is a complex subject to teach. Teachers find climate change a challenging topic to teach due to a myriad of reasons. Gayford, 2010 describes some of the challenges teachers face while teaching climate change science as “first, the controversial nature of the topic; second, it does not relate well to the normal sequencing and division of topics within most science courses; and, third, there are important non-scientific aspects to possible solutions to the problem” (p.1191). This is a particular challenge for teachers with a diverse population. This paper reports on teachers’ understanding of climate change science concepts and how to teach science with a focus on cultural relevance by participating in a three-year teacher profession development program specifically for science teachers teaching a large population of Native American students. Overall teachers demonstrated gains in understanding of how scientists access data to study climate impacts and how to present climate change science concepts that tap into culturally relevant ways

Weaving strands of knowledge. Learning about environmental change in the Bhutan Himalayas

Climate change is a complex phenomenon, so much so that even those with expert knowledge on the scientific data struggle to understand the impacts of climate change on their everyday lives. Contradictions across systems of knowledge make clear that climate change is not just a problem of scientific understanding but is also simultaneously a problem of global coordination as well as a sociopolitical problem of connecting domains of knowledge that are seldom valued equitably. The project described in this paper is a prototype effort to put knowledge from community members in two culturally distinct rural areas of the world at equal footing with scientific knowledge. The overarching project aim was to design partnership-based inquiry into environmental and climate change that coordinated the aforementioned three facets of climate change (a) scientific understanding, (b) cross-cultural coordination among globally dispersed communities, and (c) sociopolitical equity in bringing nondominant perspectives to the table.Climate change is a complex phenomenon, so much so that even those with expert knowledge on the scientific data struggle to understand the impacts of climate change on their everyday lives. Contradictions across systems of knowledge make clear that climate change is not just a problem of scientific understanding but is also simultaneously a problem of global coordination as well as a sociopolitical problem of connecting domains of knowledge that are seldom valued equitably. The project described in this paper is a prototype effort to put knowledge from community members in two culturally distinct rural areas of the world at equal footing with scientific knowledge. The overarching project aim was to design partnership-based inquiry into environmental and climate change that coordinated the aforementioned three facets of climate change (a) scientific understanding, (b) cross-cultural coordination among globally dispersed communities, and (c) sociopolitical equity in bringing nondominant perspectives to the table

Using Systems Mapping to Plan Scientific Investigations

Learn how to map mental models that students use to explain how the world works