raising the green roof

This project combines expertise in elementary science education and sustainable architecture to develop a green roof unit for the elementary classroom.  The looming crises of climate change and diminishing resources, together with increasing needs for green infrastructure, will require a more ecologically literate citizenry. However, few opportunities exist for the general public to gain green infrastructure knowledge. This project will address these gaps by designing, piloting, and evaluating an elementary science unit about green roofs and the water cycle. The unit will: 1) leverage green infrastructure and engineering expertise at the Missouri S&T campus to build curricular resources and then 2) encourage place-based learning for schools to use their own building as an educational tool.   Unit occurred in Spring-Summer 2021. The unit was tested with 2 schools in the same school district in Fall 2021 and then improved for dissemination based on the initial implementation. The photo gallery below show images from the teacher professional development when our team prepared fourth grade educators to teach the unit in Summer 2021.

See our related publication: "Raising the Green Roof: Enhancing Youth Water Literacy through Built Environment Education"

Faculty: Dr. Laura Cole (PI), Dr. Laura Zangori, Dr. Beth Kania-Goshe, and Dr. Joel Burken

Graduate Students: Lilian Priscilla and Sepideh Fallahhosseini