Learning Through Exploration: Promoting Understanding of Climate Change and Environmental Studies to High School Students from Historically Marginalized Backgrounds

Education that covers topics such as climate change is critical to developing future scientists and researchers. Facilitating students’ recognition of climate change as it occurs in their community can strengthen engagement with the content. Here, we highlight our work in developing a large-scale activity that introduced many facets of climate education to high school students (ages 14–18) from historically marginalized backgrounds by connecting the concepts with their local environment. The chemistry and science lessons were delivered through a combination of hands-on activities and mini-presentations, and student engagement with the content was determined by examining the extent to which they agreed with various statements. The activity used six stations with activities contextualized to problems occurring in our local city of Miami to cover different climate change-related themes: Global Warming, Recycling, Sunscreen, Microplastics, Microorganisms, and Plants. Overall, the described collection enabled climate education for students with hands-on, engaging activities, most of which were done without advanced lab equipment, facilitating the execution of these activities in limited-resource settings. We sought to increase students’ engagement with climate education by curating and adapting content to be relevant to our local coastal climate. The critical deliverable of increasing students’ interest in studying environmental science was supported by a large positive shift in agreement, indicating that exposure to these topics piqued potential long-term interest in the field.