Heather F. Clark

California State University, Dominguez Hills | CSUDH · School of Education

This paper presents the argument that climate change should be taught in schools as a sociopolitical and scientific process, and that students should be able to use their science knowledge to think critically about climate change as a social justice issue. A necessary and achievable outcome of science education is critical climate awareness—an unde...

This article examines two teachers' efforts to re‐organize their science teaching around issues of environmental and food justice in the urban community where they teach through the pedagogical approach of community‐oriented framing. We introduce this approach to teachers' framing of phenomena in community as supporting students' framing of phenome...

Instructional practices in science education often create dichotomies of “expert” and “outsider” that produce distinct power differences in classrooms. Building upon the idea of “making present practice” to disrupt these binaries, this paper presents select findings from a year-long study investigating two urban teachers' use of community-based sci...

Teacher preparation programs currently struggle to (a) address the challenges preparing students to use computing principles, and (b) do so in ways that apply a critical lens toward societal inequities. In this paper, we describe our (1) integrated STEM and computational thinking (CT) teacher preparation program; (2) response to barriers educators...

This case study presents the efforts of three high school teachers to design and implement climate change lessons in alignment with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Using three conceptual frameworks that organize the assumptions of the environment in the NGSS we examine how those assumptions influence teacher practice when teachers str...

This study quantifies historic and current mercury contamination in New Haven Harbor (New Haven, Connecticut, USA) through the analysis of sediment cores. The mercury concentration measured in surface sediment ranged from 320 to 1640 microg kg(-1) with an average of 530 microg kg(-1). The harbor is relatively small in area (6.6 km(2)) but displays...

Mercury levels were measured in various environmental compartments of the Quinnipiac River system (CT, USA). In streams, dissolved mercury reached a maximum of 6.3 ng L-1 during baseflow and 30 ng L-1 during stormflow, whereas surficial impoundment sediments had a maximum mercury concentration of 420 g kg-1. A sediment core collected from the Quinn...

Environmental lead contamination is prevalent in urban areas where soil represents a significant sink and pathway of exposure. This study characterizes the speciation of lead that is relevant to local recontamination and to human exposure in the backyard gardens of Roxbury and Dorchester, MA, USA. One hundred forty-one backyard gardens were tested...

The chemistry of Pb in urban soil must be understood in order to limit human exposure to Pb in soil and produce and to implement remediation schemes. In inner-city gardens where Pb contamination is prevalent and financial resources are limited, it is critical to identify the variables that control Pb bioavailability. Field-portable X-ray fluorescen...