The AMS Education Program: National-local partnerships to increase science literacy

The mission of the American Meteorological Society's (AMS) Education Program is to foster scientific literacy and promote diversity in the geosciences by providing professional development opportunities for teachers nationwide and innovative undergraduate survey course packages for colleges to locally implement. These unique national-local teaching partnerships link educators with trained teachers, college and university faculty, and scientists.

The AMS trains pre-college educators through two-week summer residence workshops in meteorology (Project Atmosphere) and the physical foundations of oceanography (Maury Project). Each fall and spring semester, AMS guides Local Implementation Teams (LITs) throughout the U.S. to offer DataStreme Atmosphere, DataStreme Ocean and AMS' newest course, DataStreme Earth's Climate System (ECS), which investigates Earth's climate system and societal impacts of climate change by using the most current, real-world environmental data. The three-member LITs - typically composed of a AMS-trained teacher leader, college faculty member, and geoscientist - each recruit and administer the courses to about eight teachers per semester. They give emphasis to recruiting pre-college teachers who are members of minority groups and/or teach at schools with a 25% or greater minority student population. These programs have directly trained over 15,000 resource educators, who promote the teaching of Earth sciences across the entire K-12 curriculum, and have impacted over one million students. Pre-college educational initiatives are supported by NSF, NOAA, NASA, and the U.S. Navy.

AMS Weather Studies, AMS Ocean Studies, and the new AMS Climate Studies are introductory-college level turnkey course packages available for licensing and local offering/credit by colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Canada. Over 500 institutions have offered these courses to about 55,000 students. Revenues from these courses support some of the programs for K-12 teachers. National Science Foundation-supported Diversity Projects have trained college faculty members from 200 minority-serving institutions to offer the Weather and Ocean courses.

AMS strongly encourages broadcast meteorologists to participate in AMS Education Program initiatives by becoming members of DataStreme Local Implementation Teams and promoting the local offering of the college survey courses. For a complete list of projects organized through the AMS Education Program and for our contact information, please see http://www.ametsoc.org/amsedu.