Humanities and the Sunshine State: Teaching Florida's Climates will not be offered in Summer 2021.
Please check back here and at the program Facebook page for updates on future years.
Since 2016, Humanities and the Sunshine State: Teaching Florida’s Climates has brought together Florida educators of all subjects and age groups to develop creative strategies for teaching climate change in a politically neutral way. This program brings the humanities and ecological sciences into dialog in Florida’s springs, forests, and coastal ecosystems to give educators a variety of tools to recognize the impacts of contemporary climate change across Florida. Using systems thinking to explore the interrelationships of our environmental and social systems, the program includes experiential activities in history and oral history, biology, literature, mathematics, archaeology, and marine sciences.
Today’s Florida can be seen in a historical perspective of climatic variations spanning millennia of geological years and thousands of years of human inhabitation of the peninsula. By showing how humans have experienced and responded to environmental changes over this time period, the seminar teaches adaptation as a necessary way of life for Floridians in the context of optimism for our future. In this way, the seminar empowers educators and students to be hopeful agents of necessary change.
This five-day educator workshop is open to all educators and disciplines, including full‐time, certified K‐12 public or private school teachers of any subject, media specialists, librarians, guidance counselors, school and district administrators, state college professors, museum educators, National Park Service interpreters, and Florida State Park interpreters. Educators work in a well-supported and academically stimulating environment with Master Teachers in the humanities and sciences to develop Florida state standards-based lesson planning components throughout the workshop. Documentation for In-Service credits is provided.
View Highlights from the 2017 Program
This workshop has been made possible in part by the Florida Humanities Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this workshop, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
