With funding from the national Science Foundation and Donors of the AGI Foundation, the American Geological Institute has developed a new high school Earth Science curriculum, "Earth System Science in the Community - Understanding Our Environment," otherwise known as "EarthComm." The curriculum is structured around five major units, each containing three chapters. Sprinkled throughout the fifteen chapters are 90 inquiry-based investigations written by six teams of Earth science educators at universities and high schools throughout the United States. AGI develops EarthComm curriculum
The titles of the five major units are "Earth System Science," "Dynamic Geosphere," "Dynamic Environments and Ecosystems," "Fluid Earth," and "Earth Resources." The curriculum was developed in response to the National Science Education Standards, a 1994 AGI Conference on Planning Earth Science Education in the Community, and the 1991 AGI publication Earth Science Education for the 21st Century: A Planning Guide. It was guided by ten fundamental ideas that are emphasized in all units:
"1. EARTH SCIENCE LITERACY empowers us to understand our environment, make wise decisions that affect quality of life, and manage resources, environments, and hazards.
"2. EARTH'S DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM SYSTEM contains [a] seemingly infinite number of subsystems from atoms to planetary spheres. Materials interact and flow among these subsystems due to natural forces and energy flowing through the system from sources inside and outside of the planet. These interactions, changes, forces and flows tend to occur in off-setting directions and amounts. Materials tend to flow in chains, cycles, and webs that tend toward equilibrium states in which energy is distributed as uniformly as possible. The net result is a state of balanced change or dynamic equilibrium, a condition that appears to have existed for billions of years.
"3. CHANGE THROUGH TIME produced the Earth we now see, the net result of constancy, gradual changes, and episodic changes over human, geological, and astronomical scales of time and space.
"4. EXTRATERRESTRIAL INFLUENCES upon earth include extraterrestrial energy and materials, and influences due to its position and motion as a subsystem of an evolving solar system, galaxy, and universe.
"5. THE DYNAMIC GEOSPHERE includes a rocky exterior upon which ecosystems and human communities developed and a molten interior with convection circulation that generates the magnetosphere and drives plate tectonics. It contains resources that sustain life, causes natural hazards that may threaten life, and affects all of Earth's other geospheres.
"6. FLUID SPHERES within the Earth system include the hydrosphere, atmosphere, and cryosphere, which interact and flow to produce ever-changing weather, climate, glaciers, seascapes, and water resources that affect human communities, and which shape the land, transfer Earth materials and energy, and change surface environments and ecosystems.
"7. DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS AND ECOSYSTEMS are produced by the interaction of all the geosphere at the Earth's surface and include many different environments, ecosystems, and communities which affect one another and change through time.
"8. EARTH RESOURCES include the nonrenewable and renewable supplies of energy, mineral, and water resources upon which individuals and communities depend in order to maintain quality of human life, economic prosperity, and requirements for industrialization.
"9. NATURAL HAZARDS associated with Earth processes and events include drought, floods, storms, volcanic activity, earthquakes, and climate change [and] can pose risks to humans, their property, and communities. Earth science is used to study, predict, and mitigate natural hazards so that we can assess risks, plan wisely, and adapt to the effects of natural hazards.
"10. STEWARDSHIP AND SUSTAINABILITY go hand in hand. Humans and communities must understand their dependency on Earth resources and environments, realize their influences on the Earth systems, appreciate Earth's carrying capacity, manage and conserve nonrenewable resources and environments, develop alternate sources of energy and materials required for human sustenance, face the prospect of human extinction, and invent new technologies that foster these parameters of stewardship in order to sustain the presence and quality of human life."
The EarthComm chapters are presently undergoing field testing, which will be completed in June 1999. Further information about EarthComm, including the text of two of the fifteen chapters, is available on the EarthComm web site: http://www.agiweb.org/earthcomm.
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