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.