Environmental Education through the Smithsonian, with Carol O’Donnell

Notable Quotes

• Contextualizing education within local communities: “We want students to become active partners in creating a more sustainable and equitable community by using data and discourse to inform their actions … This data, discourse, and development strategy [is] a way of framing how important it is for us to get students to collect data [about] real-world problems and phenomena, understand it, become informed consumers of data, and most importantly to make sure that the data makes sense to them because it’s meaningful and local.” (11:32)
• Science education intersects with environmental justice and culture: “[Environmental justice] is incredibly important to the Smithsonian … Equity is inherent in work like ours—we’re a science education center. People might say to me, ‘Carol, why are you teaching this? You’re supposed to just be teaching the science of the environment.’ When you’re embedded in an organization and an institution like the Smithsonian, learning is transdisciplinary and cultural, no matter the topic.” (21:10)
• Interpretation of environmental issues like climate change can vary for different age groups: “While we might ask general questions, the level of interpretation, data collection, analysis, discourse, or development depends on the age range of the individuals doing the activity. In other words, we apply what we know developmentally about different age ranges, but we also ask questions that would allow students of any age to respond.” (28:22)

Top of the Stack

• “Data, Discourse, and Development: Building a Sustainable World through Education and Science Communication” by Heidi Gibson, Mary E. Short, and Carol O’Donnell
• Smithsonian Science Education Center
• Smithsonian Science for Global Goals Project
• EJScreen: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, from the US Environmental Protection Agency
• Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It by Gale Sinatra and Barbara Hofer

The Full Transcript

Margaret Walls: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I’m your host, Margaret Walls.

My guest today is Carol O’Donnell, executive director of the Smithsonian Science Education Center in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian Science Education Center was established in 1985 under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Academy of Sciences. The center is the only organization at the Smithsonian that is solely dedicated to education for students in kindergarten through grade 12 (K–12). The center is focused on promoting STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—teaching and learning; ensuring diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion in STEM; and advancing STEM education for sustainable development.

We’re going to mostly talk about that last part of the education center’s work. We’ll learn about the center’s programs and resources for teaching environment and sustainability topics to K–12 students, including the topic of climate change. We’ll also discuss how teachers, parents, and the rest of us can engage kids in science, data, and discourse about the environment. Stay with us.

Carol, hello. It’s great to talk with you today. Thank you for coming on the show.

Carol O’Donnell: Thank you for inviting me, Margaret.

Margaret Walls: Before we dive into the heart of our conversation, we always like to start our show by learning a bit more about our guests and how they came to do what they do. Can I ask you to share a little about yourself and your background?

Carol O’Donnell: I was a first-generation college student on financial aid who lived in the inner city of Pittsburgh in the early ’80s. Environmental issues in Pittsburgh were due to pollutants that were caused by our local steel mills, which were prominent in Pittsburgh at the time; they’re less prominent today.

Opportunities for advanced education were limited, so, when I was given the unique opportunity to go to college, I quickly realized the impact that a good education would have on promoting economic and social mobility. Ever since then, I have made education my life’s work. My four children, who are all adults now, and my husband would probably describe me as a workaholic. I’m not sure I like that, but I like to think of myself as someone who tirelessly advocates for the promotion of education.

In addition to serving as a public school teacher in Virginia, which is where I live, I’ve worked at George Washington University, where I got my doctorate, and the US Department of Education. Now, I’m here at the Smithsonian, where I’ve been for 18 years. In addition to being a science nerd, which I think you probably are, too, I have also worked to improve access to science education for all people, especially those who are excluded from educational opportunities because of who they are and where they live. In the Pittsburgh I grew up in, there were people in my neighborhood who weren’t expected to go to college. That’s not okay. I’ve dedicated my life to thinking about the fact that all people should have access to education.

At the Smithsonian Science Education Center, we engage K–12 teachers to develop and implement strategies that we call the Universal Design for Learning. This is just one of our programs, but this program in particular is important to me, because we’re focused on trying to get students with mental and physical disabilities to see STEM as a field that is accessible to them. This program is near and dear to my heart, because my husband was a special education teacher for 30 years. We want to make certain that all students have access to STEM. Today, when you and I talk, we’re going to talk about how we also use sustainability topics to help students engage in STEM.

I want to say thank you again for inviting me. STEM education has a lot of different access points. My own four kids are all focusing on STEM careers. I think all of us together—no matter what our career is and including what you do and the people who are listening to this podcast—share a goal of helping ensure a sustainable planet.

Margaret Walls: Let’s talk a bit about the Smithsonian Science for Global Goals Project. That project provides young people not just in the United States, but also around the world, with knowledge and skills to dig into the science that underlies the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The United Nations has established 17 goals that range from poverty, hunger, and health to affordable and clean energy, clean water and sanitation, action on climate change, and more. You all have linked this project, in broad terms, to the United Nations goals. Can you tell us about how that works, why you decided to build off the United Nations goals, and a bit more about that effort?

Carol O’Donnell: We’ve been living through this for the past three years, but sometimes these world emergencies absolutely make us reconsider the way that we educate our youth. While we’ve recently been thinking specifically about COVID-19, this project started in 2016.

Let’s rewind to January 2016. It was about four months after I had just returned to the Smithsonian. Now, I’m serving as the executive director. I had been gone for two decades. It was January of 2016, and I was in Santiago, Chile, at this global council meeting of the InterAcademy Partnership, which is a collaboration of 143 countries that have national academies. As you mentioned at the beginning, our center was founded by both the Smithsonian and the US National Academy of Sciences.

We were at this meeting in Santiago, Chile, and Zika was prevalent at the time. Even though mosquito-borne diseases kill about a million people per year, Zika was suddenly creeping in on the United States and spreading around the world. People were concerned about it. All of these scientists said, “We’ve got to make a difference. We’ve got to do something to educate youth on the underlying science and social science of mosquito-borne diseases.”

With the financial support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we were able to get started. However, we didn’t have a framework, because there were no broad, global curriculum standards for science education. In the United States, when students learn something, they’re using US standards. But if you want to educate students on a complex topic across the entire globe, you need a framework.

That’s where the Sustainable Development Goals came into play. This is the compendium targeting the world’s most pernicious and damaging problems. They’re referred to as the “SDGs”; sometimes they’re called the global goals. They provide a unique opportunity to ground student learning in real-world, pressing global issues.

We decided to use the goals as a framework for learning. It opened up the doors for us to be able to help students understand not only the physical science, but also the social science and the spirit of taking action that is absolutely necessary if we want to meet those goals by 2030. Today, over 41,000 educators from 88 countries serving 4.7 million students have been engaged in some way. We appreciate that broader framework that the UN Sustainable Development Goals provides.

Margaret Walls: I read your paper that talks about this project. You coauthored the paper, which was recently published in the journal Frontiers in Communication, where you describe the approach of the Science for Global Goals Project. You call it “data, discourse, and development.” In particular, I’d like you to talk about the data component. At Resources for the Future, we’re really into data, so we like this. This is the idea that young people learn how to gather, interpret, and analyze data and build what you call data literacy skills. Can you talk about that a bit?

Carol O’Donnell: It’s funny, because I agree with you on this idea of questioning how we use data. Economists care about data, certain professions care about data, but what do students do in classrooms in order to better understand how to use data and understand what it means? During COVID-19, we started to realize this pressure that was put on us, because we were seeing data in real time, and people either believed the data or they didn’t. All of a sudden, the science was impacted by whether people were fully realizing how to use or interpret the data. While science was playing out in front of us in the public sphere, information was flying, and people were trying to communicate information about the importance of COVID-19, we started to realize, “Data literacy is really important.” When we are engaged in global discourse around data, it allows us to engage in sustainable development.

The problem, however, is that data can be misused and the public can question the validity of data. They don’t know who to trust—where are they going to get their data from? They become concerned about what the data actually means. We saw that play out with COVID-19. The same can be true of climate change and other environmental issues. Some science educators right now are being challenged. They’re being asked to avoid discussing certain topics that relate to data. And all of this is emblematic of an even larger problem, which is the inability of people to understand data, use data, and make informed decisions about the data.

In the article that was published in Frontiers in Communication, we describe how the Smithsonian Science for Global Goals Project invites young people, who range in age from about 8 to 17, to use data, change discourse and the things they talk about, and then develop their own communities with inspiration from the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Our pedagogical approach is to encourage students to use their community as their laboratory to conduct investigations in their community, to gather and analyze from their community, and build data literacy skills. That’s the data part of it.

Second, we ask them to communicate the information: What does the information mean to you? Have you noticed any concerns that people might have about climate change? That’s a way that the data becomes a part of catalyzing and changing community conversations to make sure that they’re more informed. Finally, we want students to become active partners in creating a more sustainable and equitable community by using data and discourse to inform their actions. My colleague, Heidi Gibson, came up with this data, discourse, and development strategy as a way of framing how important it is for us to get students to collect data from real-world problems and phenomena, understand it, become informed consumers of data, and most importantly to make sure that the data makes sense to them because it’s meaningful and local.

Margaret Walls: To follow up on this notion of what you mean by data, can you talk about how these activities might vary by age? You must expect different things from a 10-year-old or a 16-year-old. For the second part of that question, you want to use a community as a laboratory, so you try to focus these activities on local communities and issues. I assume that’s intentional—to get people motivated. Can you talk about that part, too?

Carol O’Donnell: To answer your first question about how data-gathering activities vary by age, we’re going to come back to focusing on the United States. In the United States, and this is true of almost every nation, there is a set of standards. In the United States, each state sets its standards, but we have coalesced around a set of science standards called the Next Generation Science Standards. Not every state has adopted them, but a majority of states have. They’ve outlined for students ages 5–18 what students should know and be able to do at each grade level. In addition, they’ve also said that students should engage in science and engineering practices.

One of the most important practices that we want students to engage in is analyzing and interpreting data. That’s a skill that develops over time, and it’s not the same for all age ranges. For students ages 5–7, the teacher builds on the student’s prior personal experiences—maybe from their home—and progresses gradually to help students collect data, record data, and then share observations about data.

The students might collect data firsthand, or they might get data from media, but the analysis of the data could range from general observations about, such as what students notice about the data to what patterns they see in the data. This is common for young students. That data could be either about the natural world, which is science, or the design world, which is engineering. Ideally, this analysis is driven by a question that’s relevant to the students, but unfortunately the question seems to always be driven by the teacher.

For ages 8–11, the students are introduced to quantitative data. They might shift away from observations of objects or pictures to start to think about numbers. They could conduct multiple trials, collect that data, use digital tools, graphically analyze or display the data, and then try to make sense of the phenomenon using reasoning and even computation.

As we get older, for the ages 12–14, students start to progress to extending their quantitative analysis. Economists think about this all the time—the difference between causation and correlation. They might begin to use basic statistical techniques or look at error analysis.

Finally, in secondary school, at the ages of 15–18, students are now starting to use more refined statistical analysis. They’re comparing data sets for consistency. They’re using models to generate and analyze data to make valid and reliable scientific claims, they understand the terms “valid” and “reliable,” and they might even determine an optimal design solution. In each of these cases, there’s a structured progression of learning. That’s important.

To get to your second question around local communities and local issues, when you’re talking about a transdisciplinary topic like climate change or environmental issues like clean water, clean energy, or clean air, there are a lot of different forms of data observations, ideas, objects, photographs, travel patterns, and social data—just like in any type of science. We try to integrate those forms into the teaching and learning.

Now, to the question about local communities—local issues are important. In many science classrooms, even in the United States, we give students data, and we ask students to make meaning of the data. Sometimes, that’s a black box to them. Sometimes, we give them an experimental question, and we ask them to collect the data, but we’re still driving the question for them.

The idea of creating more localized data collection is that we want it to be contextualized within the problems that students face locally. Data can be drawn from local opinions; for example, surveying local thoughts, culture, and ways of knowing. We’re trying to build students’ data literacy skills by letting them collect their own data locally and understanding the issue from a local perspective, analyzing it, and then trying to apply localized solutions. That’s the biggest difference. We’re trying to get students to think about how data helps address locally critical issues. This application is sustainable development.

Margaret Walls: Let me ask you about the discourse component of this three-step approach. You make the point that the data and data analysis alone aren’t enough; we need to help students engage in community discourse. You’ve already talked about this a bit, but one thing we can all agree on in this day and age is that we’re bombarded with misinformation or information that is not based on data and analysis. You mentioned the problems with COVID-19. How do you approach this challenge or face these headwinds and get students to engage in discourse that’s about the data?

Carol O’Donnell: This is one of the most important things that we’ve seen changing in science education recently, not only in the United States, but across the globe. That’s this idea that there’s an important, prominent role that discourse has taken in learning. Students should be talking to each other. This is not a new idea, but it’s certainly one that’s taken on more prominence. By talking to each other, they’re making sense of data, making meaning of it, and constructing knowledge.

Going back to the way students are learning science in the United States, two common science and engineering practices are, one, that students engage in argument using evidence; and two, that students obtain, evaluate, and communicate that information. At the heart of both of those is discourse. In order for students to collect data, data alone is insufficient. We also need to help students engage in local and global community discourse about the data to amplify the science, help students make sense of the complex scientific issue, and talk about the data in ways that are place-based and relevant so that we can help students understand how and why their values, identities, and histories might influence their perspective of data.

That perspective on data is incredibly important, because, if we simply give students data and ask them to analyze the data, and they’re not considering different perspectives, then we remove this incredible barrier that exists when people resist data. It’s not enough to know what data means in the abstract; the meaning has to be understood within the context of the local community, and discourse helps us to do that.

Margaret Walls: I want to talk about the curricula that you have available, which can be found on the Science for Global Goals Project webpage. One piece in particular that caught my eye is environmental justice, which I believe is one of the newest ones you have. Can you tell us why you decided to tackle environmental justice as a topic in the project, and then can you walk us through some of the items in that particular curriculum and what you’re trying to achieve?

Carol O’Donnell: The Smithsonian Science Education Center is only one of around 37 different organizations that make up the Smithsonian. One of those organizations is the Anacostia Community Museum in the local Washington, DC, area, and they are launching an environmental justice center.

This topic is incredibly important to the Smithsonian. Why? Because we have 21 museums, 9 research centers, 3 cultural centers, and a zoo. We are probably one of the most transdisciplinary places that exist. Plus, we have a leader—secretary Lonnie Bunch—who has spent his entire career focused on ensuring equity. Equity is inherent in work like ours—we’re a science education center. People might say to me, “Carol, why are you teaching this? You’re supposed to just be teaching the science of the environment.” When you’re embedded in an organization and an institution like the Smithsonian, learning is transdisciplinary and cultural, no matter what the topic.

Learning about science has to be grounded in cultural context. You’re going to hear that theme over and over in this podcast. That’s why environmental justice and the environmental justice guide we developed were crucial to the Global Goals project. The guide helps young people ages 8–17 learn more about the concerns of their community so that they’re communicating accurate, helpful, and trusted information about environmental justice. There are eight investigations, which are all hands-on, that students engage in to do what we call “discover, understand, and act.”

Students learn about how they interact with their environment. They write their own definition of “environment.” They research environmental justice issues throughout history. They learn about a specific environmental issue in their community that’s relevant to their area and the causes of this particular problem. They examine how different environments can make people more or less healthy. All of these lenses use their community as their lab. They discover the themes of injustices, they learn to understand solutions to environmental problems. Then, of course, they take action in their own communities.

I’m going to give you two examples that are my favorite from this particular guide. The first one is when students are asked to reflect. We don’t tell students what environmental justice means and then give them a definition. That’s very didactic. We don’t do that. Instead, we get them to think about real-world situations in which environmental injustices and justices have occurred.

I’m going to give you two of these scenarios. In the first one, one country sends old computers, broken phones, and other electronics to another country. Although the other country is paid to take the waste, it exposes their people to toxic materials. We get students to talk about that one scenario. What do you think about this idea? Is this a good idea to do this? Why might this be good or bad, healthy or not healthy for the people in the community?

You never just share one scenario with someone and think they can come up with a definition. In comparative analysis, you’d give them multiple scenarios. Another scenario might be that vehicles go to and from a local warehouse, polluting the surrounding air. Studies show that warehouses are more likely to be built in neighborhoods where many people of color live. Students talk about this scenario. They begin now to compare the two scenarios. They begin to think about and reflect on their own community or other communities they know. That helps students begin to think about the relevance in their own lives and create their own working definition of environmental justice. That’s one example of how students engage in a topic from a personal perspective.

The second example is where we get students to use the US Environmental Protection Agency’s EJScreen tool. If you haven’t seen this, this is the coolest screening tool. It’s a screening and mapping tool, and it’s available for free. The agency made it known to us because we were interviewing them. You put in your ZIP code or a ZIP code of interest to you, and the tool shows you economic, social, and environmental trends in that community.

I did this with my hometown ZIP code in Pittsburgh, and then I did it with my ZIP code where I live today. In my neighborhood where I grew up, which is economically disadvantaged and socially diverse relative to the surrounding neighborhoods,you saw this incredible image emerge in which there were higher incidence of asthma, higher concentrations of pollutants, and lower socioeconomic status. They were all correlated with one another based on this EJ screener. It’s a powerful tool to help kids begin to think about a complex, abstract topic in a very concrete way.

Margaret Walls: I’m familiar with that tool. It’s really useful.

Carol, I want to take a step back and ask more general questions and pick your brain as the expert here about teaching kids about the environment and what’s age appropriate. I’m thinking particularly about climate change, which on the one hand can be abstract, especially to younger kids, and on the other hand can maybe be overwhelmingly big and hard to deal with for older ones. I’m wondering if you have any guidance, especially around climate change, to know what’s right for different ages when you’re talking about these topics.

Carol O’Donnell: First of all, the important thing is that each of these guides is developed by a curriculum developer who has classroom experience. That’s important. They’ve spent their life focused on understanding the pedagogical and developmental differences between students at different ages. That’s important, but it’s not enough. It’s still one individual.

We also incorporate youth voices and youth perspectives by bringing in high school– and college-age interns into the development process. They become a part of the development of the guides. In addition, we field test the guides with teachers around the world in different regions—seven different regions, typically—to obtain feedback from teachers and students on the usability, feasibility, and the implementation of the guide. We also try to begin each guide by asking students to create their own identity maps.

I could ask you, myself, a five-year-old, a ten-year-old, and an eighteen-year old to all do the same activity, and the results would be completely different. The reason is that it’s personalized, it’s community-based, and it’s place-based. While we might ask general questions, the level of interpretation, data collection, analysis, discourse, or development depends on the age range of the individuals doing the activity. In other words, we apply what we know developmentally about different age ranges, but we also ask questions that would allow students of any age to respond. We provide the support for that.

This is important for us. From the beginning, we’re getting students to engage in things and develop an identity map with which they’re thinking about themselves and the things that are of interest to them and then comparing that to the multifaceted identities in their own classroom or community. That allows us to get students to think about complex topics from multiple perspectives. If you think about environmental issues when you’re talking to a group of economists, you might think, “All right, if I’m going to talk about the environment, I don’t want to just talk about it from an environmental perspective, I want to talk about it from a social, ethical, and environmental perspective.” We’re trying to bring in these multiple perspectives so that we have the ability to bring in what’s fundamentally important to youth of any age.

In our climate action guide, which we’re developing right now but is not available yet, some of the questions that we ask that are developmentally appropriate might be, What are the direct risks, not of climate change, but of the climate, to your community? We might get them to begin to think about the climate, how the climate is changing, and actions that they might take to protect themselves from that changing climate before we introduce a construct like climate change. That is one of the differences, for example, between younger students and older students.

We might also get them to think about what words about climate or climate change are the most important to them. Depending upon their age range, the response is going to be different. What are some of the things you think about when different people are talking about climate change? This framework allows us to help students investigate complex topics like the Earth’s energy budget or how things have changed and humans’ influence from a perspective that is pedagogically and developmentally appropriate for young people based on the kinds of language that a young person uses. This is our approach to support young people as they become action-takers, collecting data in their own communities. We’re scaffolding their development over time based on their age appropriateness or developmental appropriateness.

Margaret Walls: It’s been great hearing about all of this, Carol, and all the good work you’re doing. We’re going to close our podcast with a regular feature we have that we call Top of the Stack, where we ask you to recommend some good content to our listeners, whether it’s a book, an article, or a podcast. So, Carol O’Donnell, what’s on the top of your stack?

Carol O’Donnell: I would probably say Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do About It. It’s one of my favorite books on my shelf. It was written by two educational psychologists who are trying to understand how individuals decide, for example, whether to accept the human causes of climate change, vaccinate their children against a childhood disease, or practice social distancing during a pandemic.

I really like this book because it outlines the principles that are fundamental to the Smithsonian’s mission, which is the increase and diffusion of knowledge—this idea that democracies depend on educated citizens who make informed decisions for the benefit of their health, their well-being, their communities, their nation, and, of course, their planet. I hope that your readers might take a look at this book Science Denial because it tackles why science denial exists, how you understand your own biases and those of others, and ways to address the problem.

Margaret Walls: I’ll be on the lookout for that. Carol, it’s been a pleasure having you on Resources Radio. I’m glad we were able to learn a bit about the Smithsonian Science Education Center and all the great work you’re doing, and I really appreciate you taking time out of what I know is a busy schedule to talk to me. Thank you so much.

Carol O’Donnell: Thank you for the invitation. Take care.

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