Jonah Maidoff

Jonah Maidoff used his 2016 Vision Fellowship award to develop a project-based social/environmental curriculum, Equator to the Arctic, that provided opportunities for high school students to investigate real-world climate change issues, develop environmental skills and propose solutions to the impacts of climate change. The curriculum did this through hands-on study and gave students, and the community in which they live, tools for understanding the changing climate, identifying local risks and making assessments and plans for adaptation and remediation. Jonah is a social science teacher for the 7th, 8th, 11th and 12th grades at the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School. As part of project, he and several Charter School students traveled to Alaska in the summer of 2016 to work with the Woods Hole Research Center on experiments and data collection for understanding climate change and effects on permafrost. In the subsequent year, Jonah worked with other Charter School teachers to help develop a project based program for other schools and communities to address local climate and food issues and organized and oversaw a student trip to Cuba where students learned about agroecology and urban agriculture in a fossil fuel/pesticide limited region.