Catching permafrost in the Zwickau classroom
Earth’s Polar Regions are not included in the school curriculum in Saxony, SE Germany. However, in the media their role in climate change is often emphasized. Understanding the related connections is difficult for the pupils and therefore has little influence on their climate relevant behavior. Clim...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Conference Object |
| Language: | unknown |
| Published: |
2016
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/41980/ https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.48781 |
| Summary: | Earth’s Polar Regions are not included in the school curriculum in Saxony, SE Germany. However, in the media their role in climate change is often emphasized. Understanding the related connections is difficult for the pupils and therefore has little influence on their climate relevant behavior. Climate change and the connection to the Polar Regions could be approached multidisciplinary as a comprehensive topic in various school subjects. At the KOMPAKT School in Zwickau, twelve pupils of grade 6 were interested in permafrost as a subject and dedicated several weeks to the topic. The goals included understanding basic principles, build on those to gain specific knowledge and finally find possibilities to use this knowledge in school. In the first part of the project, the students built a simplified model that allowed studying permafrost thaw and the related consequences. These studies were accompanied by observations of thawing and freezing of different soil and vegetation samples. The students reported their observations becoming familiar with keeping records of the setup and the experiments’ outcome. They used their protocols to create a documentation of the experimental work. The cooperation with the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam then allowed the pupils to connect to scientists working on permafrost, to learn about the scientific questions those scientists address, and how and where they worked on. The pupils had the pos- sibility to ask questions about fieldwork and follow up lab work during a visit at AWI in Potsdam. An additional part of the project was the collection of information from permafrost related articles in newspapers and journals. The pupils are not used to long, scientific texts, the extraction of relevant content and relating this information to their own knowledge was very difficult. One key insight of this part of the project was that results of scientific research can lead to vastly different interpretations. Complete answers, as the pupils know them from class, are not provided. ... |
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