1 NOAA Center for Coastal and Marine Ecosystems, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, FL
2 NOAA Center for Coastal and Marine Ecosystems, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, TX
The NOAA Center for Coastal and Marine Ecosystems (CCME) is a Cooperative Science Center comprised of six universities working in partnership with NOAA and funded by the NOAA Office of Education’s Education Partnership Program with Minority-Serving Institutions. The mission of the NOAA CCME is to educate and train students, particularly from underrepresented communities, in NOAA-mission relevant fields. The professional development and experiential learning activities augment formal academic coursework and research that seeks to cultivate core competencies and groom students for the NOAA workforce.
In keeping with this mission, NOAA CCME student scholar cohorts receive their education and training at their home institutions which is strengthened by center wide activities and individually-tailored NOAA internships. Every other year the NOAA CCME holds a Center-wide Core Competency (CWCC) intensive one-week course that brings the scholars and experts from the six academic institutions, NOAA and state agencies together. The CWCC consists of field and classroom-based components with structured instruction on the three primary NOAA CCME focal areas of Place-Based Conservation, Coastal Resilience, and Coastal Intelligence along with two cross-cutting areas of Big Data and Social Science. The course culminates in a problem-based learning activity of a local real life coastal environmental issue; students assume various stakeholder roles as government agency personnel: neighborhood citizens, local businesses, local government, NGO-environmental advocacy, and state government. Each group then develops an argument with supporting data for their position on the issue and presents at a mock town hall meeting. In this presentation, representatives of the NOAA CCME will demonstrate elements of the CWCC to encourage the development of similar training activities within this STEM learning community that seeks to integrate the social sciences by including human dimensions.
The NOAA CCME is led by Florida A&M University with Bethune-Cookman University, California State University-Monterey Bay, Jackson State University, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, and University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley as partnering institutions.
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