Overview

Over the past several years, the GER community has been engaged in a systematic effort to identify ambitious goals for geoscience education research that will be achievable within ten years and will have significant impact on K-16 geoscience education teaching and learning. This effort has been spearheaded by a series of NSF-funded workshops at the first three Earth Educator Rendezvous meetings: in 2015, Synthesizing Geoscience Education Research; in 2016, Geoscience Education Research Community Planning; and in 2017, Geoscience Education Research Grand Challenges and Strategies. A significant result from these workshop is a framework of grand challenges, defined as priority research questions, in ten different themes of geoscience education research as well as strategies to address those questions. A second result from the previous EER workshop is a community-built website designed to support geoscience education research.

As a new chapter in this effort, the intent of this workshop is to create a space for dialogue across communities with GER interests. We will build on past workshops by focusing especially on one of the themes, research on teaching about Earth in the context of societal problems. In this workshop, we will explore ways in which this theme intersects with and supports other identified themes in the framework. To address the goal of building dialogue across communities, we will also incorporate explicit discussions about 1) the ways that addressing different identified grand challenges could contribute to ongoing educational research questions outside of the geosciences, and 2) how future Earth Educators' Rendezvous meetings might be used to help move research on the grand challenges forward.

Workshop Program » Participant Workspace »

Target Audience

This workshop seeks to bring together those who are interested in research questions related to teaching about Earth in the context of societal problems. As a central goal of this workshop is to encourage dialogue across communities, we invite participants who will approach the topic from an empirical perspective, as well as those will approach the topic from teaching perspectives, in a wide range of contexts (K-12, postsecondary, informal, and nonformal settings). We invite, as well, participation from those whose research interests may intersect with the topic of teaching about the Earth in the context of societal problems; examples include research related to: conceptual understanding of environmental, ocean, atmosphere, and climate science; elementary, middle, and secondary Earth science teacher education; students' self-regulated learning, metacognition, and affective domain; and access and success of underrepresented groups in the geosciences.

Goals

• Examine collective interest in teaching about the Earth in the context of societal issues.
  
• Identify strengths and limitations of different theoretical frameworks for explaining how teaching about Earth in the context of societal problems leads to student learning.
  
• Analyze and review different specific measures or methods for studying teaching and learning about Earth in the context of societal problems.
  
• Discuss and develop possible paths forward for longitudinal or multi-institutional studies related to teaching about Earth in the context of societal problems.
  

Format

Participants in this workshop will have opportunities to interact with others through guided activities, small- and large-group discussions, individual presentations, and panel discussions.