Climate READY: A three-semester youth empowerment program

General Comments

This article describes a 3-semester credit-bearing program called “Climate READY” at Florida Atlantic University’s satellite campus, Pine Jog Environmental Education Center (FAU Pine Jog). It is well organized and well written, with clearly stated project objectives and a testable and measurable hypothesis that the program would “increase the environmental literacy of 4–12 grade students in Palm Beach County, FL and the general community that they live in so that they can become more resilient to extreme weather and/or other environmental hazards, thus empowering them to become involved in achieving that resilience.” 

The article describes the program in depth: the methods section is written with thorough detail; the results section provides a great deal of data from pre- and post-testing of both the high school students in the dual-enrollment (high school/college credits) cohort, and of their younger 4th-5th grade mentees in an after-school program on the FAU Pine Jog campus. Ample and clear data tables register both groups’ learning of basic facts about climate-change, as well as their attitudes and sense of perceived personal agency around climate change readiness in their communities. Data show how community outreach service presentations by the Ambassadors changed their sense of community connection and personal agency.  The data and statistical analyses support the discussion and conclusions the authors draw from it. 

The project and this article fall nicely within the mission and scope of GC, i.e. providing “outreach, public engagement, widening participation, knowledge exchange, and…any initiative which seeks to communicate an aspect of geoscience to a wider audience than the experts within that particular field.” The project itself focused on exactly these goals, and this article is written for accessibility to a diverse audience, which might include primary and secondary school teachers and districts, college and dual-enrollment environmental program planners, local groups and governing boards who consider climate change readiness at the community level, local/regional environmentalist groups, parents and home-schooling families, school-community partnerships, and others. 

Some new or lesser-known concepts and tools featured in the narrative include the following: 

• An after-school/college partnership with a three-pronged programmatic approach to teaching climate literacy and climate-change readiness: (1) a dual-enrollment college course for high school students, (2) a cross-age peer teaching/learning experience, and (3) a community outreach service program, all based in the 3-semester college course using original course curriculum designed by the authors.
• Ample data points from pre- and post- testing (of both age-groups) using questions designed by the authors, many of which are based on high school and college earth science textbooks, and on the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network’s Climate Literacy Quiz.
• Use of the NOAA-created earth-science technology tool, SOS–Science on a Sphere, to teach both age groups, including for the cross-age peer teaching.
• Measured evaluation of the “train the trainer” technique, with high schoolers as the mentors for younger students and also as presenters for community groups, events, and boards. 

All of these features merit the documentation by this article. It was a pleasure to read. EB

Specific Comments

Title Concise and to the point. I had some confusion over which age-group of “youth” was your focus for “empowerment”, then realized it was both. You might want to clarify early in the intro.

Abstract  

-Throughout the article there are frequent shifts back and forth from grades 4-5 mentees to CR ambassadors (e.g. L242 “students that participated in the program”--mentees? Ambassadors too?), which confuses the reader when both groups are sometimes referred to as students.  Can you find a shorthand way to distinguish between age groups when speaking about “students?”  The use of “Ambassadors” works for older ones; you need a term for their mentees.

Intro

-L43-50–Without some kind of professional development, teachers are unsure how to approach these topics.  Yes, as Lambert found in 2012, teacher-preparation issue was a major factor then, but it’s now 12 years later, and teachers need to be given credit for the significant professional development most have taken since then. Let’s move away from blaming teacher-prep. Can you acknowledge Florida’s unfriendly soil for climate science education standards, especially in light of the state’s Stop-W.O.K.E. act, and the teachers’ legitimate fear of losing their jobs if they teach topics or use vocabulary some parent or community member might object to?  How to work around this conundrum? 

–Also might mention - where FL lines up with other states’ standards about Climate Change,e.g.   https://ncse.ngo/making-grade-how-state-public-school-standards-address-climate-change ,  which studied all 50 states’ science standards w/ respect to climate change info/education. I understand that these may be touchy areas, but we have free academic speech in this country, and it is so important to exercise it–especially in universities!

-L70 A few places of ameri-centrism to fix, e.g. next environmental "ground zero"--specify “in US” or region; check throughout for USA-centric references and try to relate them in global terms

-Consider a side-note or endnote near the Abstract, explaining (for non-American readers) terms like Title 1, free & reduced lunch, dual enrollment (line 200 is too late). Also ages of students in grades 9-12 and 4-5, early in the Intro.

Methods

–L150– First paragraph is confusing. Maybe bullet list the 3 components. Tighten it up.

–So sad that Covid interrupted the first year of a beautifully planned program. You made lemonade from the lemons. 

–L175-200 It’s a little confusing about how (and why) the Galaxy E3 students were part of the high school students’ learning about CC with SOS, and whether these overlap with the after-school program students who were mentored by the high schoolers. After several reads it gets clearer, but few folks will read 3 times. Please tighten this up.

Results

All quite clear except -L335 one misstatement– “fewer” should say more, if I’m reading correctly. Table 7 bears this out.     After their experience, …significantly fewer students reported that they do not question [ADD: the science of] climate change (Table 7)  The sort-of double negative implied by the question makes it pretty confusing.

–L327  Most students (96%) were between 15 and 16 years of age and female (72%), 55% of the students described themselves as White, 36% as Hispanic or Latino, and 18% as Black. 

Did this reflect local populations? Seems it might be skewed white?  Given that  “Students from underserved communities were prioritized in the recruitment process” (L200), was this disappointing? Maybe treat this question in the Discussion section?  Is this the impetus for your recommendation to do multiple in-person recruitment sessions?

Discussion section

–The fourth feature discussed in general comments above, training high schoolers as “ambassadors” to do dispersed outreach to elder and younger counterparts in their communities, might gain more credence from skeptics if supported with some research citations about the efficacy of cross-age peer teaching and of community service-learning. 

[Some places to start might include: 

• Promoting Positive Youth Development Through Teenagers-as-Teachers Programs,   Steven M. Worker, Iaccopucci, Bird, and Horowitz, Jl Adolescent research  (2018)  https://doi.org/10.1177/0743558418764089
• Filges T, Dietrichson J, Viinholt BCA, Dalgaard NT. Service learning for improving academic success in students in grade K to 12: A systematic review. Campbell Syst Rev. 2022 Jan 7;18(1):e1210. doi: 10.1002/cl2.1210. PMID: 36913211; PMCID: PMC8741202.]

–You might make a little space for connecting this project to the wider world of similar collaborations between high schoolers (as mentors, teachers), and younger students? And for highlighting how you see your project developing and perhaps disseminating, being replicated in other districts and regions.

--And where your students’ pre/post beliefs line up with USA  (and wider world?) (see EdWeek Research Center survey, October 2022  https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teens-know-climate-change-is-real-they-want-schools-to-teach-more-about-it/2022/11

–And more clearly state your own novel contribution to the literature on Climate Change Readiness education, (such as the curriculum you developed, and train-the- trainer/peer teaching approach.) 

Conclusions section

–Could use a statement about future programmatic or research steps, if any are planned. Suggestion for further research by FAU and others, would be whether school-college partnerships and cross-age peer teaching could serve to scale up community/regional climate readiness quickly.

–As an aside, I presume you got parental permission for public presentations for the ambassadors under the age of majority? Could be important, especially if there is a community member present with a political ax to grind. This happened to our high school students while presenting at a town meeting. We (staff) stepped in to stop the speaker from becoming abusive, and the high school students were unfazed, but parental permission was a safety-net throughout our students’ public presentations road-show. You might do well to include it as a recommendation for other school-college partnerships tracing your footsteps, which I hope they will do.

Technical corrections

L 6–spell check for dropped “d” on “Dedicate” Youth–might be in a couple of places

L 21 Data were collected from students—specify both age groups

L.34. minimal level of environmental literacy that is, the possession of...   awk. punctuation

L 54 grades 4-12 (youth ages 9 to 18)    specify 2 groups, 9-10 and 14-18?

L 174 heading is about High School ambassador program, but next para goes into SOS curriculum developed in collaboration with E3 Galaxy elem. School–confusing at first

–Paragraphs at L175 and L199–might it help to switch their order, to give a better picture of the Ambassador program before delving into the SOS curriculum and Galaxy school collaboration they followed?

Table 18–your students’ results may have been affected by the wording of the question. Since current sea level rise is not specified in the question, other answers could be marked as correct, since future rise may well occur with ice sheet melting, etc.

-L490 table 23, why are there check marks on “Shorter days & fewer hurricanes”? These would not be considered correct answers, thus should not be checked, right?

I enjoyed learning about this program and reading this preprint. In general, I think this is a really interesting initiative, and it makes sense to write up your evaluation for this publication. However, I think it needs major revisions, mostly in the form of restructuring, consolidating redundant sections, and adding a few missing pieces.

General Comments:

This article provides a very detailed evaluation of a climate education intiative in Florida. There are a number of interesting and novel features of this program that are clearly described and studied. However, my main feedback would be to revisit the article so that it is less of a program evaluation, and more of a contribution to the growing body of literature related to climate change education. With that in mind, I would encourage you to add more of a literature review section to the introduction, especially in terms of concepts of environmental literacy and relevant educational theories with respect to the pedagogical (e.g., place-based, active learning, case studies, Photovoice) and methodological approaches of both the program and research. Similarly, towards the end of the article you very much focus on specific operational recommendations rather than reflect on the results of your research and how this could be of use to other researchers and practioners in terms of pedagogy/methodology.

The desciptions of the program are combined with the descriptions of the data collection tools used in the research/evaluation. I think the article would benefit from breaking these out more clearly into distinct sections. For example, Section 2.2 could be a new section 3 focused on Research Methodology, and Section 2.1 could be combined with some of the related/redundant program description in Section 4. This restructuring would also allow you to refocus Section 4 on discussing the results in Section 3 in relationship to the ideas introduced earlier in the article, and advance the contributions of this study related to environmental education research and practice, rather than simply describing the program activities in relation to the program objectives. 

You include a great amount of detail in the results section (2), and include a 10-page appendix of additional information (that lacks a clear focus or structure). While this level of detail makes your research very transparent, it also makes it difficult for the reader to easily identify the key findings and contributions of the article. I would suggest revisiting the results and appendix with an eye on the findings most related to your hypothesis. It might make sense to create multiple appendices with a clearer focus (Teaching Materials, Program Outputs, etc). As an example of too much detail for a research article (versus program evaluation), I don't think you should include Table 19 in the body of the article, but could consider including in an appendix.

At the same time, there are a some aspects of the program which I think may be underutilised in terms educational interventions that result in program outputs that could also serve as data for qualitative analysis (beyond the quantitative data of the pre/post tests). You mention Photovoice in passing, which is a well established participatory action research method. The storybooks are also a really interesting aspect of the ambassadors' engagement with younger students. While you reflect of the value of storytelling, and include some more information in the appendix, there is no detailed explanation of the specific themes, narratives and creative approaches in the storybooks. To me, this is the most interesting part of your project (students teaching students, storytelling supporting climate resilience, etc).

Specific Comments:

In the introduction, I think it would make sense to include a citation for the definition of environmental literacy outlined.

When you refer to grades 4-12 (ages 9-18) in section 1.1, it raises a question of the appropriateness of such a large age range for an educational intervention. Later in the article you make clear there are two distinct populations: the primary participants (high school students) and the seconday participants (grade 4-5), which makes more sense. I would suggest you explain the specific audiences and ages in more detail in 1.1, perhaps simply as a parenthetical.

In Figure 1, I don't think the second map (b) adds much value, especially given the similar scale and more stylised icons and edges.

In section 4.1.4, are you introducing a new community survey that hasn't be mentioned earlier in the article? I wouldn't mention an additional form of data collection for the first time in the discussion section, so definitely worth describing this earlier (the survey in the methods section, and the responses in the results section).