Teaching Energy Generation As a Way to Teach Environmental Justice Issues in a High School Physics Classroom

Energy and electricity are major concerns for communities as well as being major topics in physics learning. My colleagues and I adopted our energy and electricity instruction and added a unit in order to help students connect their learning to local environmental justice issues. An important goal is to help students understand that science is implicated in ethical decision making that affects them and their communities. In this way, we hope to better prepare students to both understand social problems as scientists and address them as citizens. In this poster, I will provide an overview of the unit we created, example lessons and projects, examples of student work and a reflection on the experience. The unit that we developed started with a conceptual background into electromagnetism and then moved into students understanding how energy was generated. Students debated which energy sources Massachusetts should increase their use of and made posters about local environmental justice issues.

An energy generation unit in a Boston high school physics classroom combines traditional topics in energy, electricity and electromagnetism with local environmental justice issues. #EnergyandEquity