Hot Takes by the UCLA Heat Lab
As global warming worsens, heat increasingly impacts people's daily lives - influencing health, behavior, and more. But, we often aren’t very conscious about heat and knowledge of it doesn’t get shared beyond academia and specialized fields. In every episode, our hosts engage different researchers, activists, or community members to share their work and how it can be applied in the real world.
Hot Takes by the UCLA Heat Lab
Ep 5 - Bringing the Heat to Early Education with the Heat Lab Education Team
There is a critical need for more in-depth environmental curricula to prepare students for the climate-impacted world they'll soon inherit. The UCLA Heat Lab's education team creates digestible lesson plans about thermal inequality for students ranging from 4th graders to high schoolers. From mapping schoolyard shade to brainstorming cool inventions, join us for a behind-the-scenes look on the trials and triumphs of inspiring the next generation of climate leaders.
Check out shownotes at: https://tinyurl.com/hottakes5
Hello everyone and welcome to the Hot Takes podcast. I'm your host, natalie Gertzler. This episode is with the education team and we'll be discussing their experiences with teaching heat challenges in lesson crafting and what education means to them. The Hot Takes podcast is brought to you by the hottest lab on campus, the UCLA Heat Lab, with production support from Chelsea, tran, tracy, tran, karina Brunn, natalie Gertzler and Jason Sutaja. We are generously funded by the Green Initiative Fund. You can email us at hottakesucla at gmailcom with any suggestions so we can work to improve your listening experience. Also, don't forget to give the podcast a rating on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and follow our Instagram at UCLA Heat Lab. Without further ado, let's get into the conversation with the education team. So to start, can I have you guys all introduce yourselves.
Speaker 2:I can start us off. Hello, my name is Tracy. I'm a fourth year environmental science major.
Speaker 3:My name is Zao. I am a fourth year human, bio and society major.
Speaker 4:Hi, my name is Sophia and I'm a fourth year. Human biology and society major and anthropology minor.
Speaker 5:Hi, my name is Ashwin and I'm a fourth year human biology and society major.
Speaker 1:And I'm Natalie, just to reintroduce myself. I am also on the education team and I am a second year human biology and society major. Before we get into talking about the research, it is a hot takes tradition to start every episode with a little fire starter, which is our version of an icebreaker, and that is what is one of your earliest memories associated with heat.
Speaker 3:I think one of my earliest memories of heat. I grew up in a very small rural village in Vietnam where it gets like really really, really hot and very humid and obviously, since we were in a rural village, there was like no fans, no air conditioning. So I think one of my earliest memories was like playing outside and being really hot and my mom like drenching me in cold water to like rain, cold water to get me to cool down, but it just gave me a very bad cold and I was bedridden for many days yeah, one of my earliest memories of heat was playing on the playground at recess in elementary school.
Speaker 4:I remember going down the slide and I'd like burn my leg or like burn a hand touching the monkey bars.
Speaker 2:Um so, yeah, just playing at recess um, I think it's kind of hard for me to like pinpoint when, like my first memory with like heat was, or when I first really thought about it as being something that made life not as convenient as I wanted it to be. Um, I think like a memory that I think is kind of silly is so I grew up with my parents like working in the garment industry so they also couldn't leave their like seven-year-old kid at home, so sometimes they took me along with them, but like the conditions there kind of sucked. So it was like super hot. There was no AC.
Speaker 2:They had to like leave all like the doors open and there was only one door in the facility and then the rest of it was like a garage door. So they would like leave that open. And I remember just like sitting in like the. It wasn't even really a lobby, but it was like the entrance area and sometimes when it's really hot, there are a lot of like ants that come up and like crawl around. So I was like sitting near the door just like watching a whole line of ants just like crawl back and forth, yeah, so I don't know if that's like heat affiliated, but I thought it was a very interesting thing thing.
Speaker 5:I would say one of my most vivid experiences with heat was when I went also a global experience visiting my grandparents in India, and I remember clearly that we were traveling for the first time in December and I wasn't quite sure of what I would be expecting, but as usual, it was very hot as well as very humid, and one of the largest changes was especially with sleeping, and I noticed that I had a lot more trouble falling asleep when it was hot and humid. There'd also be multiple power cuts during the day so we couldn't turn on fans. There wasn't really much air conditioning either, and I remember coming back to California and it was about 65 degrees and noticing that very stark difference.
Speaker 1:That's really fascinating. It seems like we have a lot of global experiences with heat. It's not just heat in Los Angeles, but it seems that you guys have experienced heat from all over the world. So part of the mission of the education team is to provide lessons surrounding heat and environmental issues for K-12 students. We have a lot of different subtopics. Right now we're working on a book. We also have groups that are doing seminar lessons or outreach to high schools. We are even working on an after-school program for one of the local school districts. So there are lots of different subsections of the education team. But I really wanted to ask you guys what does the education team mean to you? Like, why did you join the team? Like, what do you really want to get out of it? And yeah, just like its overall meaning from your perspective.
Speaker 4:Education is really important to me, especially science and health education, and I think starting that at a young age is extremely impactful. With climate change getting worse and worse, that's the future that these students have to live in, so making them knowledgeable at a young age is really important. That's kind of why I joined. Making them knowledgeable at a young age is really important. That's kind of why I joined.
Speaker 2:I think Sophia brought up like some really good points. Similarly, I also really value education. I feel like growing up, my family always like emphasized the importance of education. So I kind of joined the team because I just kind of wanted to bring a little bit more awareness towards environmental issues, whether it be like climate change. But also I want to kind of like hit the nail home on how, like climate change and like environmental issues are not proportional. So, whether it be like well, I think we did an episode on like shade and like shade inequality that was brought up. So it's kind of like those things, I want people to just be a little bit more equipped, whether it be like at a younger age. I think sooner is better than later.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I mean, I totally agree. That's kind of how you guys wrangled me in. I was learning about shade and heat through you guys when I was still in high school, and that's how I even got involved in the lab. So I fully believe, you know, the education team has made its impact and I'm forever grateful for it. And with that being said, I'm also curious what have some of your guys' favorite lessons been? You know we've done a lot of different lessons with a lot of different schools. By this point, some lessons are even within UCLA itself. So I'm really just curious to hear, like do you have any really fond memories from these lessons, or any challenges, any stories, anything of the sort?
Speaker 2:I have a story to share, one of the things that I wanted to explore a lot more. This happened like sometime around last year where we kind of wanted to expand education to like a younger audience, especially when it comes to topics about heat. Expand education to like a younger audience, especially when it comes to topics about heat, since I don't think a lot of people really think about heat being like a concept that affects health and impacts lives until like college and even then, like if you're not taking classes that are focused for that topic, you won't really know. So like last year's whole endeavor with the education team was making like heat education accessible to fourth graders. We specifically chose fourth graders because kind of wanted to um appeal to their like physical science and like environmental science standard. Um, along with like fulfilling our mission as well, and a lesson that remains like very well ingrained in my memory was one where we had them. We kind of taught them about heat inequality and one of the activities we had them do was create a little poster about an invention that they want to create or they thought about, to combat these like issues and like the issues, since they're so young, was, you know, like the slide's too hot or I can't play on the monkey bars or like we're all inside today because it's like over 100 degrees in Los Angeles.
Speaker 2:And I think it was memorable because my invention I forgot what it was called the ice seat or something basically it was like a seat that cools you off as you slide down a metal slide and I had to like draw like a drawing on it and I don't think the kids took too well to it because I'm not that big of an artist. So I like drew it and I looked at it and I was like this is a very interesting drawing and I had to redraw it like three different times before I showed them. And I don't know, like fourth graders they can be kind of mean sometimes in like the fun, in the most fun way possible. But yeah, I was, tldr was getting super roasted for my drawing of an ice seat. Sorry, I was long winded.
Speaker 1:No, all good. Yeah, I remember that lesson. I guess, to preface for our audience, our lesson was a follow-up from our first few lessons and by this point we had already established, like what does shade mean to them? What is thermal inequality? Stuff about heat on the playground, and this lesson specifically was coming up with an invention that they think could help mitigate extreme heat on the playground. So it was a really fun lesson, but sometimes it was a little difficult because the ideas were either super really out there or they kind of weren't quite understanding the lessons. And, with that being said, I'm really curious as to like what were some issues or methods that you're using coming up with these lessons? You know it's not the easiest thing to teach science to elementary schoolers, and plenty of issues did come up along the way. I was wondering if you guys could just touch base on those a little bit, you know.
Speaker 2:I don't want to steal the mic again, I just want to like do like a quick note on like creating lesson plans and stuff. I know that talking about like climate change and like environmental change can be kind of depressing. So, like one of our biggest fears was making like the younger generation feel like responsible to like change the world or responsible to like fix these issues. So, yeah, we kind of wanted to make our lessons garnered around like the idea of like empowerment and how like knowledge is power and having like children like learn about these things isn't to make them feel like they have like a large responsibility. But yeah, I know, um Sophia, you had something to add to this, so I'm gonna pass it over. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So one of my favorite lesson plans that we did was actually before I joined the education team, but we went to a local high school and we talked all about our work in the food truck team, which is another team, part of the heat lab. Actually, if you haven't already listened to the hot takes episode, you definitely should. It's called unveiling the hot truth about food trucks. The Sophia Sabra you definitely should. It's called Unveiling the Hot Truth About Food Trucks with Sophia Sabra and Olivia Toledo the best episode. I might be a little biased but I had a lot of fun with that lesson plan and it was really interesting just to see the high schoolers' reactions to something they hadn't really discussed previously.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds super interesting. I remember when that lesson was happening I was pretty new to the team and just hearing, like, all these facts that we were coming up with about the food truck and how it connected to the zine, and it was even maybe applicable to people in their lives, you know, maybe like their parents, their family, friends, stuff like that. I found a lot of value in that lesson and I enjoyed it as well. Honestly, it was a super cool way to join the education team for one of my first years. And with that being said, I also know another educational outreach project we have going on is with you, ashwin, through your 88 seminar. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? And some steps you went through, kind of creating the lesson plan, because I know it's been three quarters in the works. Basically, you've been working on it for two quarters and this quarter you finally get to, you know, present it to a class. You're the professor. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
Speaker 5:Yeah, sure. So the seminar is called City to Self the story of heat in LA's societal landscape. So overall, it's looking at how heat cycles through society from a macro to a micro scale, and focusing on Los Angeles as a case study to look at heat's impacts on society. One of my main goals for creating this course was looking at heat literacy, which is the idea of how much the general public has an understanding of the environment and how they're able to reflect and connect heat and climate as an invisible force, to both their lived experiences, as well as the society that they're living in and the broader global scale as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm in the course right now and I've been really loving it, but would you mind touching on like some challenges you had coming up with the course? You know it's not easy to construct 10 full weeks of one hour curriculums. It's really hard to find a variety of topics that's accessible to everyone and understanding stuff like that. Um, what was your approach? Where did you even start? You know lots of people who are involved with education. I think some of the hardest parts is not what you're going to teach, but it's how you're going to teach it.
Speaker 5:So we would love to hear more about your approach to that issue yeah, I think one of the most challenging parts of this project was setting the foundation of the topic of heat and explaining that to students in a very digestible way.
Speaker 5:So when we talk about okay, I'm taking a class about heat, now what does that really mean? So I spent the first part, first few classes, really establishing that foundation on how we look at heat as this multi-sided, multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary topic, in which multi-scalar referring to how we look at heat through multiple different scales in terms of we could look at heat globally, we could look at heat on a community level all the way to an individual level of how bodies experience heat, how we could look at climate and heat in different sites, and bringing up the topic of how there's almost no site you could think of where heat or climate doesn't play a role in experience or conditions within that location. And, as this multidisciplinary issue, a topic of how students can look at heat through what they're studying. Look at heat through what they're studying, and somehow you could connect your studies, your major, your interests and your academic disciplines to studying the nature of heat and climate change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you know, a big part of lesson planning is knowing your audience. I remember when we were drafting lesson plans for Braddock we were thinking, you know, where is this school located? Where are these kids coming from? What are the demographic of the students at the school? And that would help gear, you know, a better lesson plan, a better approach, because you can't really walk into a classroom assuming anything about anyone. So that was a really important step we had to take in terms of crafting these lessons. So that was a really important step we had to take in terms of crafting these lessons and I think we were able to come out with three to four lessons.
Speaker 1:Anyone correct me if I was wrong. What were some ways we thought, or you guys thought it would be best to build upon these lessons? You know, many people might argue that these kids are too young to be learning about heat, or maybe that was even an issue you guys ran into. You know, are these kids old enough to understand the concepts we are trying to convey? What were some ways you guys worked around that?
Speaker 2:I can hop on and then anyone else that they want to add just like feel free to join. I think, yeah, lesson planning really was one of like the bigger issues for us, because I don't know, like, when you think about it, I was a fourth grader, we're all fourth graders, but I did I can't think to when I was in fourth grade like how did I learn best? Like what helped me learn? And it's kind of silly that I grew up from like I was dumb, but now I'm not dumb anymore and I, for some reason, can no longer like grasp that concept. So I think we had a lot of like researching on our end to do.
Speaker 2:Um, I think sometime before we like talked to a um like someone who gave us like really good tips on like lesson planning and education and they gave us like a whole like presentation about it and like talked us through how we can better connect with students and stuff. So that was kind of our baseline and then from there we went to look at fourth grade standards. I think we went a little bit into why we chose fourth grade. I think I talked a little bit about it, right.
Speaker 1:I think we chose fourth grade because that's when the science curriculum really begins. If I remember correctly, I think around fourth grade. That's when they start learning about global warming. So we just thought that would be a good place to start.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then from there, we had to make sure that it was somehow related to them. I think the big overarching message through what we learned, in order to teach them so that they can learn, was we need to make these experiences feel somehow personal to them or make them recognize that they're also affected by it. Yeah, ashwin, if you want to add on, you want to share some words of wisdom in this process?
Speaker 5:Yeah, so, touching a little bit on the methods and how we go about developing our curriculum, a lot of what we start off doing is looking into a needs assessment or looking into areas of Los Angeles or, especially now thinking of the elementary school project. We're looking at schools that may be more impacted by extreme heat, areas with less shade, schools that had more asphalt, and we ended up choosing Braddock Elementary School to deliver our heat workshops and lessons, and this is a school that's about 20 minutes south of UCLA and it's a school with very little access to shade, especially in the outdoor areas, and it has a very diverse population of students as well. The next step we take in developing this curriculum is the actual process of creating and implementing the climate workshops and lessons. Lessons we did was we went out and we used Google to, in a way, map their school campus and we printed out these sheets with all their buildings mapped out and their recreational areas, and during the lesson we talked about heat maps and shade maps and how different areas have different amounts of shade in Los Angeles as a whole, and when we moved into this project, the students had the ability to take red and green stickers or, in some cases red and green colored pencils and map out for themselves which parts of their school campus had more or less shade. And, as they figured out when we came back together was, wow, our school campus has almost no shade. There was a small, I think, garden area in the corner of their school that had some greenery. However, some of the students mentioned that the garden was not accessible during most of the day because they didn't want students going in there.
Speaker 5:And then the next step in this project was having the students act as decision makers, and they had the ability to now say, okay, I'm going to focus on a specific part of my school campus and see how, as a student, I would change that location.
Speaker 5:And referring back to Tracy, talking about making these lessons very individualized, the students were able to come up with a lot of different solutions for their chosen part. Some students, for example, loved basketball, or I think it was track, and they suggested installing shade structures on top of those areas and finding funding by talking to sending out notes to their principals or staff offices. Another student came up with what if we have some type of misting system that sprays mist on kids after they finish a run on the track, which was all really, really awesome. And at the end, with our methods, we end with an evaluation and we use surveys to collect data on both how much students understood about climate and heat going in to our lessons and how impactful the work that we did was in terms of how much did they gain from us going in.
Speaker 2:How much did they gain from us going in? Yeah, if you don't mind me jumping in, I think, like when you take a step back and like look at how we built up or like how we like progressed our lessons over time, it kind of started from like the micro scale of like how is heat impacting you? Like how are you directly affected and like what can you do to like fix that or like try to. And then we kind of like built outward. We started with like their elementary school and then we built out to like the LA County area and I think one of our last lessons for our elementary school arc was having them look at like tree canopy cover maps of like LA and being like oh, like, what do you notice about um like these certain areas? Do you know where you are in relative to like this map of like la county?
Speaker 2:And I think, surprisingly actually maybe not surprisingly because it's their lived experience but when we started our lessons, we're like um one of our first lessons that I should mention the stickers. We're like oh, we're going to map and see whether or not there's like shade in your like playground area. Almost all of them were like we have none. We're like there is no, there's no shade. And it was kind of silly because we were kind of like, oh, we kind of wanted them to come to that conclusion, but they kind of already have come to that conclusion. So, even though we like have a lesson plans, sometimes things like don't go as planned, but in terms of like methodology, yeah, we spent a lot of time thinking about it, like stressing about it, meeting up about it, and I think at the end of the day it still went great.
Speaker 4:So we closed our elementary school arc a little bit, but, yeah, so I think when you're making lesson plans about something like climate change and heat, what's really important is making an age-appropriate lesson plan, especially for the education team, since we do work with such a wide age range and I work in another organization here on campus where we make reading and STEM lesson plans for underserved youth in the LA area, and that's also a challenge we face is how do we make it age appropriate for whatever age group we're working with, especially when we're working with ages preschool through early middle school. I always like to think back and I know Tracy mentioned this to what curriculum I enjoyed when I was in school or how did I learn best when I was in school, especially at that age. But it's kind of difficult when you're thinking about heat. Even though I grew up in Southern California, I never really experienced a heat curriculum, so I don't really have a lot to connect these lessons to, which is why I think the work that we do in the education team is so important and making kids of all ages knowledgeable all students knowledgeable about heat, climate change, how to really survive with climate change.
Speaker 4:I also think making lessons engaging is really important. I know with the afterschool program that we are currently planning. There's a huge engagement factor going into this. That's important, because the kids aren't required to be there. We're asking kids to join and so we're asking questions while planning of how do we make these topics that can be sad at times, about heat and climate change, how do we make them fun or how do we make them engaging in an activity that students can connect to, especially at a high school level.
Speaker 1:I completely agree. I was just going to segue into that regarding the kids' age, because I feel like part of our purpose as education is, despite that, sometimes it can be a we don't. We don't really want to put them in that position where they feel bad about their circumstance. It's more that we want to put them in a position where we're uplifting them about their circumstance and being like you can be a part of the solution to this problem. So I really wanted to ask you guys, you know, are these kids too young? Like, do you think this age is too young? Because often, you know, when we look back when we were that age, we can barely recall learning about any type of environmental issues, and I really just wanted to get your guys' take on that, because it can be controversial at times.
Speaker 3:I think no, like these kids are not too young to be learning about this. Because I think when we're talking about like lesson planning and like brainstorming, what we're going to talk about, at our core we're just conceptualizing what they're already experiencing. But they're lived experiences Before. Thermal inequality was a term we threw out there. It was like, oh, my friends down the block, their school have more shade than us. These are already experiences that they are living through. We are now just giving them like the language to talk about it and to learn more about it, to like, someday, you know, take that education with them to hopefully inspire solutions.
Speaker 2:So that is my take on that and I think it is a very great take. Thank you, zhao. To build off of what Zhao was talking about, also, on top of giving them tools in their arsenal and also language to use, I kind of want to also touch upon how technically climate education is being discussed being discussed. When I was like younger, I like went to like sustainability after school class, where we like upcycled stuff, we like took random books and like turned them into, like, oh, you would throw this book away. Now it's a little hedgehog that you can display on your desk, and so I think a lot of climate education is focused around like sustainability and like arts and crafts and stuff which, like, kids normally gravitate to.
Speaker 2:But if anyone knows anything about sustainability, it's actually my mother, who uses like different bottles and does not label them and she reuses them, and I never know what I'm gonna get every time I take something out of the fridge. So I think what really like didn't hit home for me specifically was how, like sustainability just didn't feel like accessible, I guess, when like there are other like things that I experienced in my life. So I think that's what makes the education team really unique is that, like we're talking about climate change, but like framing it in a way that connects to how they experience their lives. So I think that is what makes us a little bit more different and hopefully like that. I don't think it's the concepts that's hard, it's how we deliver it. So that's basically like what we struggle with the most. But yeah, feel free to hop on anyone else.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think that's a great point. It's making it digestible, material. And not only that, but what solutions can we provide for them? Teaching them how they can work towards a less hot future, maybe. Or I know one of the lesson plans I created for the after school program was about sports and heat. I included a bunch of recommendations how, as high school athletes, they can try to stay cool and prevent heat related illness on and off the field or on and off the court. So I think providing solutions or ways that they can make a change to overall impact, the future I mean, these are young learners that we're working with and this is the future is the future. So it's really important to give them the stepping stools that they need to come up with their own thoughts and ideas and push these ideas forward.
Speaker 1:I completely agree.
Speaker 1:I feel like a lot of education takes place in a lecture format and I'm not just saying that because we are in college and it's a lecture format.
Speaker 1:But it's kind of like you know if, even if you have something super important to say, if you're not framing it in a lecture format. But it's kind of like you know if, even if you have something super important to say, if you're not framing it in a way where people are willing to listen, you know your word is as good as none, and I feel like that's so important when it comes to lesson planning is because you want to find a way to make these people want to learn what you're teaching. You know we thought about it a lot because when we were coming up with ideas for elementary schoolers or even high schoolers, you know we could make a slideshow that takes up a full hour but you know 15 minutes in these kids are going to be like, oh, they're still talking, you know, and they're going to feel really uninvolved in the educational experience. So I totally agree with the way that education needs to be re-approached. You know, kind of looked at and reformatted and yeah, I and sorry to cut you- off.
Speaker 2:No, you're pleased. I think the whole lecture point was really good and also like hits the nail on why we should like talk about these topics when they're younger, because when they're younger they're not sitting in lectures, getting their education like. They get to actually like interact with their classmates, they like have like a more like one-to-one relationship with their teachers, so it kind of like helps them, like I guess, like not only think about these things, but like build like the empathy and the other tool that they need, so when they do get to college, it'll be, they'll be ready.
Speaker 1:I mean I agree, because I think a lot of people their educational passions come from. Oh, I remember doing this when I was younger. I remember I really loved this younger. I remember you know my mom used to tell me about that when I was younger. I mean even I still remember. You know the science lessons we did in seventh grade where they had UCLA come over to our classroom and show us how to extract strawberry DNA and I was like, wow, this is so cool.
Speaker 1:So you know, these are the formative years and even if you know it's important that not just they walk away with maybe at least learning one thing, but it's more so, they walk away with like the memory or the interest, or the passion, or just planting that seed in exploration. You know you probably wouldn't be able to give a lesson and at the end of it, teach, give them a test and be like, all right, tell me everything you just learned. But you know it's about setting them up for that curiosity further down the line. And with that being said, you know, I think a common theme of our lab, which is about heat, is the idea that heat is such a multifaceted concept We've talked about it a lot it could be a sensation, it could be a concept, it can be an experience, everything of the sort, so it can be conveyed in many different ways.
Speaker 1:So I really just wanted to ask you guys, how do you teach heat? And I know that's a super broad and open-ended question, but I think it's formatted that way on purpose for how you guys teach heat.
Speaker 4:Yeah, this is a difficult question. Heat can mean a lot of different things and in a lot of different contexts. I think breaking heat down into individual concepts is really important, and how can we connect heat to what is relevant to the students we're teaching is really important.
Speaker 5:Yeah, also, I think a really important part about bringing up this idea, or the way that I did it with my course, was starting with why heat is such a uniquely relevant topic in the terms of how, every year, heat waves are, intensity, how hot it is during these heat waves, the heat wave duration so how long are these individual heat waves lasting as well as the heat wave season, so the time in between the first heat wave of the year and the last heat wave of the year. And if we look at data from the EPA, environmental Protection Agency what we can see is that there's been an increase in all four of these variables since 1950 till today, and that helped getting people started into understanding the relevance of heat and then moving into talking about heat as a this multi-scalar, multi-sided, multi-disciplinary topic. And also touching a bit on what Sophia mentioned earlier, a question that I asked my class on the first day was try to create one question that you can yet you think can be used to accurately measure sensation of heat. And this is a really difficult thing to accomplish, and it's difficult for many reasons, and what we explored was that, the first few reasons being subjectivity.
Speaker 5:So experience of heat varies very greatly from person to person due to differences in physiology, past experiences, environmental factors we heard about one student brought up psychological factors, so things of difference in emotions, expectations, in how you view heat, and then there being no standardization, so there's no universally agreed upon scale for measuring sensation of heat like there is for temperature, in that heat experience is impacted by so many factors such as humidity, airflow, ventilation, air quality and then also culture. So what are the norms and practices, as well as language barriers, that are involved in explaining or telling someone about your heat experience? Explaining or telling someone about your heat experience. So, just setting in the very beginning that it is a very broad topic and there's multiple ways to look into heat and how it impacts on multiple different levels.
Speaker 1:I couldn't agree more. I think one of the biggest things is kind of like when you tell someone you know, oh, yeah, I'm in the UCLA heat lab, they're like, oh, heat lab, what about heat? And then you sit there and you're like, yeah, what about heat? You know, you really do have to break the concept of heat down in order to even tell people you know what heat research is. Because, you know, is it like, oh, it's really hot out today? It's like, oh, you know, I'm feeling really unwell from the heat. So just even telling someone what heat is not even teaching them about it, but just telling them about heat as a concept it can become so difficult, you know, it can really stop you in your tracks and be like, wow, sophia.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think even in the UCLA heat lab we take such an interdisciplinary approach to studying heat, and that is definitely something that shows through in our lesson plans. It's not just about the hard science of heat, but it's also about how it affects people sociologically or thinking about how we can make improvements through urban planning. So many different aspects of heat that connect from a completely interdisciplinary background yeah, pretty much everywhere. So that's something that's really important to convey in our lesson plans as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it comes from everywhere and even just talking about it right now, you can tell how confused we're all getting even with ourselves. But Zhao, I think you also had something to say confused we're all getting, even with ourselves.
Speaker 3:But, zhao, I think you also had something to say. Yeah, I think heat, as complex as it is while we're talking, I think, is united in its relatability. I think heat is a sensation that all of us feel and all of us can experience. And I think to teach heat is to kind of open up that conversation, to learn about different experiences of HEAT and how our experiences may vary or are similar, and then from those experiences then like furthering those kind of conversations into more technicalities, to like more science or to more like public health, sociology and all those different interdisciplinary fields. But I think to teach heat is, you know, just to be like relatable, to have that kind of conversation with people.
Speaker 1:And I guess to kind of start wrapping things up, you know about this conversation around heat and teaching as well as learning. I wanted to open up the floor for you guys. And what are some resources for people who want to learn more about these topics? Obviously, they can't sit in at our fourth grade lessons or our high school lessons and learn with us, so what are some good places for people to start who want to learn more about heat and their own experiences?
Speaker 2:I think this podcast. Actually they can't sit in on our lessons, but they can sit in on this podcast and listen.
Speaker 5:So you should give us good ratings and also listen to our podcast so that we can keep making more website and there we've linked a lot of the projects that we are currently working on as well as the projects that we've done in the past, and they include a lot of resources that can be really helpful to look at.
Speaker 4:On the website you can find a digital copy of the food truck audit team scene called Hot Wheels, and you can also find a link to the LA Times op-ed we wrote called LA Loves Food Trucks with more heat waves that can be dangerous for people working in them.
Speaker 3:Speaking of website, we also have a social media. We are at UCLA Heat Lab on Instagram. We have highlights of our different projects on there, and we also like to highlight different heat research and heat articles that come out on our story as well.
Speaker 1:Yes, all excellent resources. Additionally, you know, if you stay up to date with the news, heat articles come out all the time and it's a really good way to inform yourself about recent developments and also, with summer coming up, different pieces of advice to stay safe throughout the hotter months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then, just so we're not recommending our own created resources, we can direct you all to the heat lab Bible that we might've mentioned a long time ago. But shade by Sam block we interviewed him as well. So, if you want to listen to our first episode and I guess redirecting you back to our podcast, to our first episode, and I guess redirecting you back to our podcast, but I think Shade is a really good read and really gives you good insight. I lied it was episode two, but, yeah, give it a listen.
Speaker 1:All right. Well, thank you guys so much, and everyone. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you would like to learn more about the education team and our work, please reference our show notes, which will be linked on our website as well as the podcast description. You can learn more about the UCLA Heat Lab on our website, heatlabhumspaceuclaedu. Once more, we would like to send our thanks to the Green Initiative Fund for making this production possible. If you enjoyed our podcast, please feel free to give us a rating. Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next time on the Hot Takes Podcast. Thank you.
