Teachers and students face a wealth of environmental health
issues and concerns in their daily lives. These include lead poisoning, which
can cause learning disabilities, polluted lake and stream water that makes fish
unhealthy to eat, and invisible but polluted air that can make breathing more
difficult for people with asthma, and cause other long-term health
problems. However, environmental health issues often seem complicated and
difficult to navigate within the structured classroom environment. The My
Environment, My Health, My Choices environmental health education project is
intended to offer students and teachers a new set of tools to address such
problems.
My Environment, My Health, My Choices is an environmental
health curriculum development project sponsored by the University of Rochester's
Environmental Health Sciences Center. The project involves teachers from the
greater Rochester, New York area (as well as throughout New York State) who
create environmental health curriculum units with the support of University of
Rochester faculty.
The curriculum units focused on specific environmental
health questions or problems that are of local, regional, or national concern.
Such problems include, for example, water pollution due to farm runoff, links
between air pollution and asthma, and the health effects linked to pesticides.
My Environment, My Health, My Choices curriculum units:
-
Have a problem-based learning or case study component
-
Include student
projects and presentations
-
Include interdisciplinary
lessons
-
Align with
New York State education standards
The My Environment, My Health, My Choices
project is intended to help teachers introduce environmental health topics in a
variety of subject classes - not simply science. The project also aims to
increase student and teacher knowledge about the links between the environment
and human health and to encourage both teachers and their students to take
action to address environmental health problems.
My Environment, My Health, My Choices is funded by
a seven-year grant from the National
Institute of Environmental Health Sciences EHSIC
Grant #ES10717.
My Environment, My Health, My Choices is
a part of the Center for
Science Education and Outreach at the University of Rochester.
|