Instructor Insights pages are part of the OCW Educator initiative, which seeks to enhance the value of OCW for educators.
Resource Overview
EarthDNA’s Climate 101 is a resource designed to provide volunteers with all the materials they need to plan and deliver interactive presentations to educate young people at universities, secondary schools, or other organizations about the urgency of climate change.
The creators of EarthDNA’s Climate 101, Brandon Leshchinskiy and Prof. Dava Newman, hope that the young people who attend these presentations will be motivated to speak with their family members and persuade them that immediate societal action is urgently needed if the earth is to remain habitable in coming years.
This resource includes the PowerPoint slides (PPTX - 81 MB) for the presentation itself, along with an introductory video from Prof. Newman, a video of Leshchinskiy actually delivering the presentation to a classroom full of students, and extensive supporting materials for volunteers, such as handouts to be distributed to participants and links to valuable factual resources on other websites.
Resource Outcomes
Resource Goals for EarthDNA Climate 101 Volunteers
- Inspire young activists to volunteer to organize and lead Climate 101 presentations
- Provide materials to support other volunteers
- Direct participant feedback to EarthDNA via anonymous surveys
We need to talk about climate change in a way that's relevant to the intended audience.
— Brandon Leshchinskiy
In the pages linked below, which present insights from interview recordings for an episode of OCW’s Chalk Radio podcast, Brandon Leshchinskiy and Prof. Dava Newman describe various aspects of how they created EarthDNA and the Climate 101 presentation.