Memo+1

=ELSI in Science Air Pollution Roll-Playing Activity=

2/11/2013
The Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory has developed several programs focusing on the Ethic, Legal, and Social Issues in Science (ELSI in Science). The Berkley Laboratory is supported through the US Department of Energy and managed by the University of California. The ELSI program is sponsored by DOE’s Human Genome Project. Their main goal of focusing on these issues is to highlight the problems that often arise from scientific inquiry and research. Although their main focus is not sustainability, some of the issues they list such as the best use of our resources and what to do when a new technology has harmful side effects do apply to areas of sustainability issues. In general their educational goals are to facilitate the understanding of controversies and world impact of scientific discovery, and to increase critical thinking about science in middle and high school students.

One area of focus is air pollution, which LBNL titles “What’s in my air, and what can I do about it?” In addition to providing a general overview of both indoor and outdoor pollution, health effects, and prevention, the site also provides several in-class activities to accompany the information. The learning objectives of these activities are to help students understand the many complicated and diverse factors that contribute to air pollution, the stakeholders, and what can be done to help clean the air and the effects any proposed action would have on various stakeholders. One such activity is their role-playing scenario, which asks students to evaluate how a city council meeting went between the city of Datesville and an oil company planning to install and drilling site along with refinery outside the city. The activity gives facts about the city such as its main economic activities, demographics, the effect on jobs and the environment the proposed oil refinery could have. Since the students are assigned different roles in which to evaluate the outcomes of the meeting and development of the oil refinery it requires thinking on a broad scale and help reinforce the idea of many different stakeholders and opinions in environmental issues. I believe this curriculum meets many of the eco-literacy goals, such as understanding diverse perspectives and identifying many areas that contribute to air pollution. The curriculum also gives a good understanding of how local government can affect the environment, but it does not do a good job of showing the other levels of government. This could potentially be strengthened by adding an EPA consultant as one of the speakers at the meeting. There also lacks the reinforcement that there could also be far-off changes by only focusing on one town, if the analysis also included a town located further away and had students think about what could be the effects on that town also the curriculum could help make this point.

Link: @http://www.lbl.gov/Education/ELSI/pollution-main.html