Newsletter (January 25, 2021)

2021 started on a rocky road with the news at the Capitol and then an emotional inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris. One day 1 of this team taking over the White House, United States signed the Paris Agreement and is planning to overturn many environmental rollbacks that the Trump administration put forward. The ESE SIG is ready to support President Biden to make a push towards Climate Change Education. ESE SIG members noted down their requests at the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet Blog.

The ESE SIG has a new website where we regularly update our events and call for papers. We hosted an online workshop with Professor Stephen Sterling which you can find on our website. We are in the process of filming our past ESE SIG Leaders to get their insights on their vision of CIES. Engage with us on twitter @CIESESESIG. Currently, we have a list serve of 500 plus members and are expanding exponentially.

As a result of multiple meetings with the SIG leaders, one of our main objectives is to form partnerships and alliances. Mike Russell, past SIG Chair has been instrumental in helping us create the NJ Education for Climate Action Stakeholders Initiative (NJ-ECASI). It is a collective of academicians, researchers, teacher trainers, NJ Department of Education, NJ Department of Environmental Protection, Board of Education Members, NGOs, Green Teams and communities all coming together for a common mission – influence policy and implementation of the integration of Climate Education in New Jersey’s school curriculum. NJ-ECASI is an organic collaboration of stakeholders engaged with the efforts to-

First, Implement the new climate change education standards across the K-12 curriculum.
Second, Scaffold the standards into higher education institutions.
Third, Ensure that our schools and colleges are properly positioned to train the clean energy workforce we will need in the coming decade.

We are early looking forward to CIES 2021. We have put together 10 fascinating panels, 1 round table session and 7 poster sessions. We will work on a repository of good practices to make the presentations and panels as engaging as possible and look forward to meeting all of you in a virtual space. We are in the look out to create synergies among our members and more meeting spaces (virtual). Look forward meeting all our SIG members and CIES members at our Business meeting on Friday April 30th, 2021 from 1:45pm to 3:15pm. At the SIG Meeting we will be discussing our plans going forward and reviewing our progress for 2020-21. We will also announce our Best Journal paper, Best Unpublished paper and Best Field Based Initiative. Marcia McKenzie, Professor, Educational Foundations Director, Sustainability and Education Policy Network (SEPN) and Bob Jickling, Professor Emeritus, Lakehead University form the panel to review papers for the award. We welcome our members to share new research to share with our listserve.

This CIES will be a different form of engagement and we are working hard to ensure that we make the most of this opportunity to connect, share and learn.