The Climate Literacy & Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) supports educators in teaching about climate and energy topics. We provide a collection of peer-reviewed, scientifically accurate resources and background information, as well as access to a community of practitioners of climate and energy literacy partners.

Educators require scientifically and pedagogically robust teaching materials to provide students with accurate information about climate and energy science. To address this need, CLEAN provides a peer-reviewed digital collection, for all levels, featuring teaching materials centered on climate and energy science. The collection includes about 1000 resources addressing topics across the fields of climate and energy.

The CLEAN project builds on the efforts of the Climate Literacy Network and the establishment of the Climate Literacy: Essential Principles of Climate Science and Energy Literacy Principles to steward a broad collection of teaching materials that facilitate students, teachers, and residents becoming climate literate. The goal is for all peoples to be informed about how the climate influences them personally and how climate influences society, as well as how humans influence climate and solutions for addressing the impacts of climate change.

The collection features learning activities, videos, and visualizations. It focuses on integrating the effective use of teaching materials across all education levels, with a particular focus on middle-school through high school (grades K-16). Each featured teaching material has undergone a rigorous review process by scientists and educators, and provides teaching tips by experts about how to implement the materials in the classroom. The collection has been aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), and resources are provided to help teachers navigate the collection and create lessons using resources aligned with the NGSS.

CLEAN provides pedagogical support for educators through our teaching guidance toolkit. There are pages with climate and energy background information, teaching tips for bringing the topics into the classroom, videos about climate literacy principles, curriculum guides to create units from CLEAN resources, and quizzes to test their knowledge. Much of this information has been translated into Spanish. The toolkit also provides ongoing professional development in the form of a regular webinar series, special webinars on relevant topics and a monthly educator newsletter tying resources from CLEAN to current events. We have website pages to help teachers address climate and energy topics with elementary audiences and audiences resistant to the topic. There is support for addressing mental health aspects of climate change, teaching about the national climate assessment, and culturally relevant teaching resources that weave climate literacy principles with regional Indigenous Knowledges.

The collection is syndicated to climate.gov, where it provides the resources for the teaching section of this official NOAA website. This section of the NOAA website won the Webby Award in 2014.

CLEAN is funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• CLEAN Resources

  Additional Info

  The award-winning CLEAN collection contains about 1000 free, online, peer-reviewed, NGSS-aligned, and ready-to-use educational resources for teaching about climate and energy including activities, lab demonstrations, visualizations, and videos which are easily searchable through various search features and tags. CLEAN also provides pedagogical support for teaching climate and energy topics.

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  Location

  online resource

  Dates

  Ongoing

  Public or Private

  Public Program (open to the public)

  Program Fee

  Not Applicable

  Online Resource

  https://cleanet.org/index.html

• CLEAN Webinars

  Additional Info

  CLEAN hosts an ongoing webinar series. Every Fall and Spring semester we facilitate a regular series of 4 educator professional development webinars to help teachers learn about CLEAN and how to address climate and energy topics in their education work. We also periodically host special webinars on more specific or relevant topics.

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  Location

  online resource

  Dates

  Ongoing

  Public or Private

  Public Program (open to the public)

  Program Fee

  No charge to attend/participate in activity or program

  Online Resource

  https://cleanet.org/clean/community/webinars/index.html