What is Our Air, Your Future: Creating Clean Air Advocates?

Welcome. My name is Elizabeth Spike. I am an Alternative School Teacher with 20 years of professional experience. I am certified to teach biology, chemistry, and earth science. I've taught in urban and suburban, private and public schools in four states. My favorite subject is environmental science. Environmental science applies foundational concepts and processes from the basic sciences plus law, geography, social sciences, and humanities woven together into one class. It is a true systems course which appeals to many students and makes science relevant and engaging. I developed Our Air, Your Future: Creating Clean Air Advocates as part of my North American Association for Environmental Education ee360 Community Fellowship.

Our Air, Your Future: Creating Clean Air Advocates is an action project to transform student awareness of air pollution into action that protects clean air. I created this site to serve as a resource for participating teens and teachers as well as any educator or community organization interested in learning more about air quality and how to get started using low cost, portable sensors.

Why teach air quality?

Teens care about the world yet may not understand how to protect their environment. Our Air, Your Future: Creating Clean Air Advocates lets students explore how air quality affects them personally as well as their friends and families, and it gives them an opportunity to address the problem of poor air quality.

Ozone and particulates are public health concerns that can impede young people from living strong, healthy, and productive lives. Schools chronically exposed to mobile and stationary sources of air pollution are targeted; they have little or no voice to resist the siting of highways and industry.

While all students are vulnerable populations, those that are targeted by highways and industry can become marginalized. Some of these students can be sensitive to air quality. When they miss school (or work), the opportunities to achieve and ultimately participate in our democracy are compromised or denied.

Students who participated in Our Air, Your Future which was a network of high schools collecting air quality across the metro Washington DC region. The project was on track to conclude with student presentations about campus ozone and particulate mitigation strategies to community leaders on Earth Day 2020. Covid put the project on hold.