Category: Education_CN Just_for_schools_CN VIRGINIA_CN

Over the weekend, the Virginia Department of Education released new standards of learning that, if approved next year, will radically reshape what and how students in the state learn in history and social studies lessons.

In mid-October, just two weeks after Hurricane Ian struck her state, Bertha Vazquez asked her class of 7th graders to go online and search for information about climate change. Specifically, she tasked them to find sites that cast doubt on its human causes and who paid for them.

Princeton University announced Thursday that the Board of Trustees has voted to divest the endowment from all publicly traded fossil-fuel companies and dissociate from 90 fossil-fuel companies that are among the worst polluters.

Under its “Fast Forward” climate action plan, which was announced in May 2021, MIT has set a goal of eliminating direct emissions from its campus by 2050. An important near-term milestone will be achieving net-zero emissions by 2026. Many other colleges and universities have set similar targets. What does it take to achieve such a dramatic reduction?

PIRE awards are visionary, ambitious, interdisciplinary, use-inspired research projects that require international collaboration. The primary goal of the program is to support high-caliber research proposals that show a clear potential for rapid scale-up and growth. Going well beyond a traditional collaboration among academic labs, one of the requirements for the proposals was to build multi-stakeholder partnerships. This resulted in an impressive set of foreign and domestic industries, local governments, banks and international organizations partnering with U.S. universities on PIRE projects.

At Stanford University, the question is ringing loud. This month, hundreds of students, faculty members and alumni, in an open letter, called on the university’s new climate school to decline funding from fossil fuel companies.

For the last two years, my students have been assigned research papers on aspects of the climate crisis, in an attempt to produce a sort of encyclopedia of carbon. Some of these subjects are big, such as the impact of different greenhouse gases. Some are smaller, such as the impact of pets, bitcoin, or the future of hydrogen-powered airplanes. They all had to follow the same format: an abstract, the paper, references, a short biography, and a 5-minute recorded video presentation explaining it.

The oil and gas industry wants to play a word-and-picture association game with you. Think of four images: a brightly colored backpack stuffed with pencils, a smiling teacher with a tablet tucked under her arm, a pair of glasses resting on a stack of pastel notebooks, and a gleaming school bus welcoming a young student onboard.

Once seen largely as the career launch-pad for Bay Street and Wall Street, some business schools are staking out a role as global problem-solvers. Over the past five years, the most ambitious schools have moved to promote sustainability-rich course content, multidisciplinary research and partnerships with underserved communities. But too many remain on the sidelines.

LaGuardia Community College is preparing to support the next generation of green energy workers from Queens as part of New York State’s efforts to expand offshore wind production.