Mission & Scope

The mission of the Earth & Mind blog is to facilitate discussion and discovery about how humans think and learn about the Earth and environment. Earth & Mind explores the intersection between Geosciences, Education and Cognitive Sciences.

We are interested in the thinking of expert geoscientists, novices, and everyone in between. We are interested in how education shapes students' knowledge, understanding, motivations, and actions concerning the Earth. We are interested in learning that takes place both inside and outside of school. We are interested in all aspects of the Earth System, including the oceans, atmosphere, solid earth, and biosphere. In this era of environmental stresses, we are definitely interested in the thinking that drives and responds to human/environment interactions.

Though discourse that is casual, public, archived, and follows the interests and passions of the participants, our goals are to:

  • Build a community of people who find this topic fascinating, plus a place for this community to meet,
  • Provide a venue for talking about big ideas in small chunks, with the expectation that sometimes a mosaic of small chunks will coalesce into new insights,
  • Uncover, share, and preserve tacit and embodied knowledge about how we think and learn, by encouraging mindful reflection by scientists, educators, and inhabitants of planet Earth,
  • Foster the social construction of knowledge by building on each other's ideas,
  • Identify veins rich in opportunity for research on learning, and match up interested students and investigators with such research topics,
  • Accelerate the flow of insights from research on learning to educational practice,
  • Conversely, accelerate the flow of insights, questions and puzzles from front line educators to the field of research on learning,
  • Contribute to building a citizenry that knows more, understands more, and cares more about the Earth and environment.
  • Earth & Mind posts and comments are the personal thoughts of the contributors, and should not be interpreted as the positions of the writers' institutions or funders.