Education and outreach efforts in support of sustainable biofuel systems

Schramm, J., R. Tinghitella, B. Wilke, and C.W. Anderson

Presented at the All Scientist and GLBRC Sustainability Meeting (2009-05-05 to 2009-05-07 )

Previous work by the Environmental Literacy group at Michigan State University has illustrated some of the difficult conceptual barriers that students encounter in attempting to better understand the environmental effects of biofuel production and the value of sustainable biofuel production systems. Despite widespread media coverage of global warming, most secondary school and early college students cannot trace carbon through processes such as photosynthesis, cellular respiration and combustion, or in particular account for how those processes affect global carbon fluxes and pools. As a result, they often don’t understand how the use of biofuels could alter the relationship between human energy consumption and global change. Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) education researchers are currently developing assessments to better gauge student understanding, as well as instructional materials targeted at the key ideas necessary to understand the social and ecological aspects of biofuel production systems. One major focus of this curricular development is around small schoolyard biofuel plots. The first advantage of schoolyard plots is in providing students with knowledge of what biofuel crop fields could look like. Beyond that, students could conduct a range of simple research projects on their school plots that would help them to understand biofuels’ effect on everything from carbon sequestration and water quality to biodiversity preservation.

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