Memo+3

The Environmental Protection Agency has produced numerous educational resources for teachers. One of the many modules for teaching air pollution is Learning About Acid Rain: A teacher’s guide for grades 6th through 8th. The booklet includes a large source of information including a timeline, summaries and experiments all pertaining to acid rain. The EPA’s mission statement is to protect Americans from environmental health hazards, enforce federal standards, and provide scientific information about the environment. This module focuses on the health and environmental impacts of acid rain, along with information about the Clean Air Act and other EPA regulations that try to decrease the amount of acid rain in our environment

Specifically this module is targeted at providing teachers with the resources necessary to teach middle school students about acid rain. The learning outcomes are to give students an understanding of what acid rain is, why it is harmful, what can be done about it, and also provide practical experiments to highlight the effects of acid rain. The curriculum is designed quite well to reach its objectives as it provides a very comprehensive overview that is age appropriate and well-designed experiments. Some Eco-Literacies covered by the current module include the understanding that health is affected by far off problems, individual actions have far off consequences, and the role of government. The EPA indicates the factory air pollution can be carried off in the wind and affect others, an important principle of understanding global issues and that actions such as using electricity contribute to air pollution. Ways to incorporate more Eco-Literacies could be to include an activity that simulates a Cap-and-Trade System and other prevention policies to strengthen the idea of way to find points of intervention. There could also be more focus on the complex and diverse causes of air pollution and in general a higher level of critical thinking could be required. Ways to include more critical thinking skills would be to include more questions about how to address the problem and also more research into how successful the Clean Air Act has actually been.

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