WHAT IS THE CELI PROJECT?
The CELI Project originated in the 2019-20 school year. Two focus groups, made up of 19 teachers and principals from both Chavez Middle School and Tennyson High School, lay the foundations for this proposal. This initial work was funded by a CSU STEM-NET grant (California State University 2020). The creative synergy at both schools was remarkable, yielding a cohesive vision, an organizational structure, and a highly-committed core group of teachers for CELI. That vision was formally adopted by the schools’ principals, the high school site councils.
Our goal is to transform students anxiety about the end of the world and develop conditional optimism via real action solutions. We want to engage students in solutions such as building solar electric and other alternative energy systems; becoming local a global citizens and stewards in order to provide the community with resiliency to our quickly changing world; and engage students directly in bringing our campuses rapid transition to carbon neutrality.
We are excited to annunce that in the Spring of 2021, the National Science Foundation funded this project for 4-years. The grant will support the necessary teacher professional development, materials needed to implement the various projects, the support from CSU East Bay leadership, and the research to prove that we are successful.
The CELI project aims to achieve all the following:
○ Motivate and reinforce STEM learning with compelling social purpose
○ Transform students’ climate and social trauma into solutions-oriented action engagement and connection to local and global community
○ Address climate-related social justice issues head-on
○ Create school identity and a culture of collaboration
○ Attract passionate learners
○ Create coherence and unified deeper meaning across the schools’ panoply of educational directives, programs, and initiatives
○ Involve all students in the schools, and as many subjects as possible
In addition to improving STEM learning, we see CELI as a pathway for changing the image, culture, and social-psychology of our schools from low-performing to a hub of passionate learners. CELI would provide the resources needed to realize this vision (development, implementation, and testing). The focus groups saw CELI as providing that ‘greater goal’ that provides cohesion of purpose, theme, and approach, in the fulfillment of existing educational directives, especially the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS, 2020), and other programs and ambitions (e.g. project-based-learning goals, STEAM building curriculum, the Farm-to-Fork Career Pathway, World House5, the Entrepreneurship Program). Beyond that, both groups saw a critical need for, and numerous means for, non-science courses to both motivate and reinforce climate science learning, and to increase engagement and agency in achieving standards in other areas, for example English Language Arts Standards (ELA, 2020). That is, CELI would provide the organization and focus to synergistically raise the entire ship, while providing students with the skills, sense of competence, motivation, and identity needed to pursue STEM careers.