About CLEAN: the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network Pathway

Digital resources for teaching about climate science, climate change and energy awareness – resources are reviewed by educators and scientists, and annotated and aligned with standards and benchmarks

Learn how resources are selected by CLEAN

CLEAN, the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) Pathway was launched in November 2010 as a new National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Pathways project. It is led by the science education expertise of TERC, CIRES, NOAA, and SERC. CLEAN builds on the efforts of the Climate Literacy Network and the establishment of the Climate Literacy: Essential Principles of Climate Science .

CLEAN's primary goal is to steward a broad collection of educational resources and foster a supporting community to help facilitate students, teachers, and citizens becoming climate literate and informed about "the climate's influence on you and society and your influence on climate."

The focus of CLEAN's efforts are to integrate the effective use of the resources across all educational levels – with a particular focus on the middle-school through undergraduate levels (grades 6-16) as well as to citizens through formal and informal education venues and communities. The activities of the CLEAN Pathway project have 3 major components.

1. CLEAN Collection- Through the identification and stewardship of existing high-quality digital resources, a collection of educational resources is being built that addresses climate literacy and energy awareness culled from the wide range of collections of such resources that are available. The resources undergo a rigorous review by multiple educators and climate scientists. The teaching resources are annotated and aligned with a) the AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy; b) the National Science Education Standards and c) the NAAEE Excellence in Environmental Education Guidelines for Learning. The initial CLEAN effort is focused on building a collection of teaching activities. The collection will be soon be expanded to include activity components (e.g. visualizations, interactives, videos) and curricula.
   
2. CLEAN Strand Map- The CLEAN collection will utilize the leading NSDL browse tool, the NSDL science literacy maps. These strand maps help teachers connect concepts, standards, and CLEAN educational resources relating to climate and energy topics by providing a way to discover how scientific concepts relate to one another. NSDL Science Literacy Maps serve teachers and students in finding resources that relate to specific science, technology and math concepts identified In the AAAS Project 2061 Benchmarks for Science Literacy. The maps illustrate connections between concepts and depict how concepts build upon one another across grade levels.
3. CLEAN Community- The project will facilitate the effective use of the teaching resources by teachers, students, and citizens. This will involve a range of activities including:
• Teleconference-online 2-hour workshops that help K-12 teachers and citizens learn to use various resources in the collection and help teachers integrate them into their classrooms; and 2.5-day virtual works to support undergraduate faculty integrate these concepts into their courses.
• The facilitation of an online community using Web 2.0 social networking tools to promote collaboration, interactivity, and knowledge sharing among its users.
• Facilitate and expand the existing Climate Literacy Network to include existing and emerging climate and energy education experts and enthusiasts.

In addition to individual reviews, resources are considered by panels made up of educators and scientists during a 2.5-day Review Camp. Information about the 2010 Review Camp can be found here.