CLEAN Teleconference Call May 17, 2016
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Engaging People in Civic Deliberations about Climate Change: NAAEE's New Environmental Issues Forums
Abstract:
Climate change is an environmental problem, but it is also a public-health issue, a threat to national security, and an economic challenge of considerable magnitude. Now, the public debate is shifting away from weighing the evidence to asking what we should do about our changing climate and the effects that are beginning to be felt. This presentation introduces NAAEE's Environmental Issues Forums (EIF) process, developed with the Kettering Foundation, and the newly published issue guide Climate Choices: How Do We Meet the Challenge of a Warming Planet? This issue guide is designed to promote meaningful, productive discussions, convened locally in face-to-face forums or online. EIF provides tools, training, and support for engaging adults and students in deliberation about sticky issues that affect the environment and communities.
Bios:
Michele Archie
Michele Archie is a principal at The Harbinger Consulting Group. Over the course of nearly 20 years, she has worked in partnership with individuals, businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and community groups on six continents to:
- Use economic analysis and community engagement to help leverage natural, historical, and cultural resources and special designations for community, economic, and conservation benefits;
- Create community learning materials on issues ranging from climate change to community-police relationships;
- Develop environmental and health education curriculum materials that have reached more than eleven million students from the Hawaiian Islands to Africa.
Michele works as an interpreter in two senses: translating volumes of complex, technical information; and presenting factual information in an engaging context. Her body of work includes dozens of reports, articles, and curriculum pieces, a Western Montana fishing guide, and a collection of ceramics her family refers to as "the heavy pottery." With that encouragement, she became a textile artist.
Bora Simmons
Bora Simmons serves as the founding director of the National Project for Excellence in Environmental Education, an initiative of the North American Association for Environmental Education (NAAEE). The Project has drawn on the insights of literally thousands of educators across the United States and around the world to craft guidelines for top-quality environmental education. After twenty years as a professor of environmental education at Northern Illinois University, Bora retired and moved the Project to the Institute for a Sustainable Environment at the University of Oregon. Bora has been actively involved in environmental education research, evaluation, and professional development for forty years.
She served as president of NAAEE; serves on numerous steering committees and boards of directors, and was an executive editor of the Journal of Environmental Education. Bora has received NAAEE's Walter E. Jeske Award for Outstanding Contributions to Environmental Education, the award for Outstanding Contributions to Research in Environmental Education, and the award for Outstanding Service to Environmental Education at the Global Level.
Frank Niepold
Frank Niepold is the Climate Education Coordinator at NOAA's Climate Program Office in Silver Spring Maryland, a co-chair of the U.S. Global Change Research Program's Education Interagency Working Group, and the U.S. Climate Action Report Education, Training, and Outreach chapter lead.
At NOAA, he develops and implements NOAA's Climate goal education and and outreach efforts that specifically relate to NOAA's Climate goal and literacy objective and is the section lead for Climate.gov's Teaching Climate. Additionally, he is the managing lead of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (GCRP) document, Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science. NOAA, NSF, NASA, AAAS Project 2061, CIRES, American Meteorological Society, and various members from both the science and education community worked to define climate literacy in the United States.
Additionally, Frank is a founding member of the CLEAN Network ( and a former Co-PI for the NSF Funded Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) Pathway project that led to the CLEAN Collection.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/frank-niepold-5a45b611
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