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Standards
We expect a wide variety of participants in this course and so can not point to any specific state education standards. A few of the organizations that promote national standards are given below. While it is up to the creativity of each teacher to transform part of the content of this course for their classroom, the course is certain to generate new insights and ideas about our world.
The content of the course will be most relevant to the following:
Science: a process of inquiry that improves our understanding of the world over time; scientists generate questions (hypotheses) about the way things are and devise logical means to answer these questions; models, theories and paradigms represent knowledge of how things operate; most theories are specific to a particular system or set of interacting systems but are not incompatible with other theories.
Geography: presenting the world in spatial terms; relationships between the physical and natural world; human interactions with the environment at different temporal and geographic scales.
Life Sciences: biodiversity; populations; ecosystems; ecology and evolution; diversity and adaptations of organisms; interdependence of organisms; form and function; speciation and extinction; geographic distribution of life.
Physical Sciences: light, heat, water; properties of matter; transformation and interactions of matter and energy; motion and forces; conservation of energy and increase in disorder.
Earth Sciences: structure of the Earth system; ocean-land-vegetation-atmosphere interactions; energy in the system; drivers and effects of global climate; climate change.
Social Sciences: people, places and the environment around the world; global connectedness; production, distribution and consumption of goods and services; conservation of biodiversity; value of biodiversity; rights and responsibilities.
National Science Education Standards
AAAS Project 2061 (see Benchmarks On-line)
The National Geography Standards (from the National Geographic Society)
National Council for the Social Studies
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