Adult Basic Education Green Jobs Curricula
These lessons and units are designed to help students understand the choices before us as a society and to understand the choices before each of us as individuals today. The way we've lived for the last fifty years just cannot be sustained. The cheap oil that has fueled our fast-paced, consumer-focused, global society is finite. We've done great damage to the planet by burning all this oil. When we burn oil, we release tons of greenhouse gases that have changed the way our global climate system works.
And finally, too many people are unable to find work that will sustain their families, to access the energy, food and housing they need, to find the health care and education resources they need. Limited resource communities have been left behind. They missed the IT job revolution and they are insistent that they will not miss the upcoming green job revolution.
This complete reinvention that we face changes everything, the students we work with need to know and be part of it. This collection of units and lessons is our first step to bring these topics and challenges into our classrooms. Units are designed to be used for GED students or for ESOL students entering the subject matter with varying degrees of prior knowledge and experience. They all focus on vocabulary development, written and oral communication skills, and basic mathematical skills.
Our hope is for these units and lessons to help you and your students learn more about the challenges we're facing at these crossroads and to take action.
Lessons and Units
Lessons are organized into four areas. Mouse over each curricula to see a popup overview. Click on the curricula to view a PDF:
- CLIMATE CHANGE
- PEAK OIL
- GREEN JOBS AND EDUCATION
- GREEN JOBS AND EDUCATION
The learners targeted are adult basic education and GED students and intermediate to advanced ESOL learners.
Each unit begins building awareness of the key issues then moves on to encourage students to explore what they believe about the ideas and opinions presented. Each unit then concludes with action projects where students can put their ideas into practice.
The length of units and lessons varies. The kinds of activities included range from discussion to small group reading and vocabulary, to Internet research, to reading and responding to graphs and math problems, to writing letters to editors and friends as well as essays, short answers, crossword puzzles and fill-in-the-blank sheets. All these units can stand along but many can be linked. Some of the lessons and activities will require you to ‘localize’ them with an article from your area newspaper.
the Green Jobs Curriculum Project Team
- Lynn Benander, Coop Power — http://www.cooppower.coop/
- Daniel Cuenca, International Language Institute — http://www.ili.edu/
- Maggie Haigis, Greenfield Community College — http://www.gcc.mass.edu/esol/
- Annette Kilminster, Franklin/Hampshire One Stop Career Center —
- Alexandra Mello, Center for New Americans — http://www.cnam.org/
- Joe Panzica, The Literacy Project — http://www.literacyproject.org/
- Laura Porter, Center for New Americans — http://www.cnam.org/
This project would not have been possible without funding and support from the Workforce Competitiveness Trust Fund administered by Commonwealth Corporation and the Massachusetts Executive Office of Labor and Workforce Development. In addition, each of the organizations we work with made it possible for us to work together and to immerse ourselves in the content.