Teaching Anthropogenic Climate Change Through Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Helping Students Think Critically About Science and Ethics in Dialogue

Anthropogenic climate change is a complicated issue involving scientific data and analyses as well as political, economic, and ethical issues. In order to capture this complexity, we developed an interdisciplinary student and faculty collaboration by (1) offering introductory lectures on scientific and ethical methods to two classes, (2) assigning the same technical and opinion texts about anthropogenic climate change to both classes, and (3) coordinating multidiscipline discussions with students about their common reading assignments. Student learning was documented using identical preand postcollaboration surveys. We hypothesized that students would be better prepared to understand and engage in public debate about anthropogenic climate change if they were first taught to distinguish clearly between scientific and ethical claims. Our results from preand postcollaboration surveys support our hypothesis; as students showed an increased understanding of the distinction between science and ethics, they were better able to critically analyze popular articles and to develop their own questions about anthropogenic climate change. The results also suggest that our students were more prepared to think critically about scientific inquiry than about ethical inquiry regarding anthropogenic climate change. 2016 National Association of Geoscience Teachers. [DOI: 10.5408/12-331.1]