The Earth is undergoing climatic changes that cascade through to human experience. The challenge for educators is to communicate the interdependent scope, magnitude, and human relevance of these issues. Many educators favor addressing the technical challenges associated with accessing and visualizing empirical observations and data. We contend that with each dataset, there is an implicit, moralizing story that justifies its collection. By making these implicit stories explicit to students (i.e. the story challenge), they are more prepared to understand the meaning and applicability of the data collected. This is because students (and all humans) are emotive reasoners first, and technical reasoners second. This presentation introduces a pedagogy focusing on the interrelationship of the technical and story challenges when communicating ocean science topics. We use international, national, and local news media as a vehicle to show students how ocean science data are transformed into a story. We then ask students to understand these media stories through common cultural narratives to understand how the data are used to further the story. Students then evaluate the degree to which the data support the story. The theoretical and practical aspects of an active learning pedagogy tested in the undergraduate classroom will be discussed. We will discuss the effect of explicitly including different cultural stories using treatment and control classes at both the University of Delaware and Colgate University.

Primary Presenter: Matthew Oliver, University of Delaware (moliver@udel.edu)

Authors:

Jon Cohen, University of Delaware  (jhcohen@udel.edu)

Joe Levy, Colgate University  (jlevy@colgate.edu)

Jeff Klein, University of Delaware  (kleinjef@udel.edu)

Shameeka Jelenewicz, University of Delaware  (sjelenew@udel.edu)