Lesson Introduction

As we discussed science as story telling and story revision, I really started to think about what it would mean to teach science in our classrooms in such a manner. When we talked about the Earth being flat or round, I started to think about my own classroom this year and times when I failed to allow my students to draw their own conclusions. The first topic that came into my head was global warming. In class, I taught the topic in a very straightforward manner; it is clear to me now that I was giving my students the conclusions they should draw about global warming without really giving them the body of evidence and observations that my conclusions were coming from. In this lesson, it will be my attempt to present the material in a more even handed way allowing students to view the data for themselves, grapple with the issues involved in an in depth way, and then draw conclusions based on their own observations. This topic lends itself to science as story telling and story revision well because it is a very current debate and because there is more than one story about global warming out there. While I may have my own beliefs about what the less wrong version of the story is, I am doing my students a disservice if I simply present a story as the “right” way to think about a topic instead of letting them analyze the data and come to their own sense of what is “right.”

Purpose: Students will decide where they stand in regards to the issue of global warming? Is global warming a crisis or a continuing trend minimally affected by human actions?