As the landscape of higher education evolves, 2-year colleges (2YC) and 4-year colleges (4YC) are increasingly turning to Open Educational Resources (OERs) to expand access, reduce costs, and enhance learning outcomes. These freely available, high-quality educational materials empower instructors to customize content, incorporate the latest research, and adopt more inclusive teaching strategies without the constraints of traditional print textbooks.OERs are especially powerful for educators due to their flexibility and ability to be shared with students and colleagues without restrictions. The core freedoms of OER are defined by the 5 R's: retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute (Wiley, D., T.J. Bliss, and M. McEwen, 2014). An OER is not static like a traditional textbook; rather, a professor can reorder, modify it to fit their course, combine it with other content, and share the results freely. This flexibility supports pedagogical innovation, enables more accessible teaching, and reduces dependency on costly, restrictive commercial textbooks.However, OERs also come with some weaknesses. First, they tend to vary in quality due to the lack of peer review. Also, they are inconsistently updated and may be abandoned if an author retires or otherwise loses interest.The AMS education team is piloting a project to update its introductory oceanography textbook and release it under an open-access license in 2026. If successful, the same approach will be applied to the introductory meteorology and climate textbooks. A unique advantage of the AMS is its ability to support these textbooks with the organization's long-standing infrastructure and expertise. This commitment ensures the books will be routinely updated and maintained indefinitely, providing faculty with trusted, high-quality resources for decades to come.By expanding its OER offerings, AMS empowers educators to teach with confidence and helps students access authoritative learning materials without barriers.

The GEodesy Tools for Societal Issues (GETSI) program equips students to tackle real-world challenges – such as natural hazards, climate change, and water resource management – by integrating geodesy data and data analysis methods into undergraduate education. It has produced 13 undergraduate teaching modules and run 47 instructor professional development events to support module use. These professional development events included 35 virtual and in-person short courses which reached ~880 people. (12 webinars reached another ~575 people.)Grounded in evidence-based best practices and honed through program assessment and necessity (i.e. the COVID19 pandemic) the GETSI program developed a core model for running instructor professional development events, which could inform other geoscience programs that need to concurrently introduce faculty to science that may be new to them, while also equipping them to use the teaching resources. The model included:--Basic science content--Teaching modules that are "ready to use"--Chance to work through module elements "like a student"--Peer-peer contact and worktime--Implementation planning timeOverall the model proved adaptable from 2-hour virtual courses to 1-day in-person courses to multi-day virtual and in-person courses. Participants were satisfied with the experience, planned to use the resources, and had increased confidence regardless of their incoming level of knowledge about the topic or the type of institution that they taught at.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used in geoscience research for modeling large datasets to understand various earth processes in the short and long-term. However, use of generative AI in geoscience classrooms, specifically for promoting systems thinking, resilience, and empathy is still in the exploratory stages. In this project students in two non-major discussion-based geoscience courses at UW-Whitewater used AI prompts for creating highly feasible imaginary disaster scenarios affecting local areas. They described the short- and long-term impacts of those imaginary scenarios on geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and human society. They were then asked to formulate potential solutions to address those disasters and compare their solutions with those generated by AI. Those disaster scenarios and potential solutions were then used for in-class group discussions. Using AI in classrooms in this manner can nurture students' creative thinking skills without sacrificing their critical thinking skills and support resilience for students who engage in material that highlights ecological disruption, climate instability, and long-term planetary change which can often evoke emotional distress. This can also make students aware of their own decision-making processes and empower them to believe that they are capable of finding potential solutions to seemingly hopeless situations not under their control and develop the ability to stay cognitively engaged and regulated under stress. This presentation will highlight our AI-based disaster activities and initiate a discussion on the implications of using AI in this way in classrooms.

We live in challenging times. Artificial Intelligence endangers not just jobs, but creativity, motivation, and one's sense of worth. Opportunity disparities pit ourselves against one another, even though we share much more in common than not. The paired climate and energy crises — and their solutions — raise temperatures globally, or disproportionately impact local environments. Technology unnecessarily saps our time, energy and concentration. Trustworthy news outlets are dwindling, making us susceptible to echo chambers, conspiracy theory, and manipulation. Education is being undermined on myriad sides, as well as from within.I hypothesize that the geosciences — and the teaching thereof — are a uniquely suited antidote to many of these threats. Drawing on anecdotal experience in the classroom and field, I note several ancillary benefits of effective geoscience education: The immense range of spatial and temporal scales of geologic processes require perspectives that are difficult to imagine, as empathy itself requires. Intensive field-based experiences can bring together students with diverse histories and strengths, and empower individuals and community. The interconnectedness of Earth system 'spheres' emphasizes how small changes can have large influences, often in unexpected ways. The slowness of geologic processes — and the study thereof — can bring deep time perspectives that should improve mental health, especially during uncertain times. The partially observable nature of the Earth system requires geoscientists to discriminate between numerous possibilities, with abundant but incomplete data, akin to the challenge of effective decision-making in our modern world. Finally, the geosciences offer tangible real-world benefits: they can provide gainful, meaningful employment that is comparatively future-proof, while providing (in some cases the only) solutions to present and impending crises. Emphasizing these benefits in our teaching may be one way to address existential challenges, while also addressing disconcerting trends in geoscience enrollments.

Geoscience has long been intertwined with settler colonialism and the systems of power that shape our understanding of land and its uses. Settler colonialism, characterized by the ongoing displacement of Indigenous populations to secure land for settlers, is a structure deeply connected to geology. Geoscience has operated as a tool of dispossession and exploitation in a settler colonial state that has perpetuated colonial beliefs while eroding Indigenous sovereignty and knowledge systems. As an extractive discipline grounded in access to territory and resources, geology developed alongside U.S. expansion, naturalizing the removal of minerals, fossils, and positioning Western knowledge over Indigenous frameworks. This presentation evolves from a USC Honors senior thesis, examining how geology can move toward anticolonial practice through collaboration and curriculum transformation. It is based on a case study involving a collection of geological samples labeled as originating from the Navajo Reservation, removed in 1988 and deaccessioned from USC's McKissick Museum in 2024. In consultation with the Navajo Nation, the discovery of this collection prompted critical questions regarding ownership, consent, cultural significance, and the ethical responsibilities of geoscientists. Rather than treating the samples solely as scientific objects, they are recontextualized within broader histories of dispossession and Indigenous sovereignty. The primary outcome of this project is the development of a physical geology laboratory activity and lecture on geology land ethics that integrates Indigenous perspectives, anticolonial methods, and the history of geoscience as a settler colonial science. The teaching module was piloted to assess student engagement and responsiveness to ethical inquiry in the earth sciences and show that ethics-centered curriculum can meaningfully shift how students understand their role as future geoscientists. By documenting both the collaborative design process and the classroom implementation, this project offers a model for geoscience departments seeking to cultivate more accountable, relational, and anticolonial land practices through education.

Why integrate science and poetry in higher education? The arts have long been deployed in service of STEM courses, but deeper and STEAMier integration offers richer benefits to the theory and practice of both science and poetry. Developing and teaching an integrated interdisciplinary course is challenging – but worth it. We draw on educational and social psychology to outline why: it fosters interdisciplinary and intercultural capacities, making our students more nimble and collaborative; it exposes students to beauty, awe, and dissonance, contributing to their cognitive development and mental wellbeing; and it emphasizes shared disciplinary practices of attention, reflection, and articulation, enhancing students' relationality to self, others, and nature. Not to mention, it's really fun. This talk presents a conceptual rationale and a practical toolkit for designing an integrative undergraduate science-poetry (or poetry-science) course, including examples of what it looks like in practice and reflections on the ways in which teaching it delighted, terrified, and changed us.

Introductory geoscience students frequently encounter challenges in connecting abstract subsurface concepts to their lived experiences and academic trajectories. This planned term-long project examines how the integration of geological inquiry with structured artistic expression can deepen conceptual understanding. The goal of this work is to strengthen observational and analytical skills and enhance student engagement in introductory geoscience courses. During a week of the term, students investigated active campus drilling and construction sites. They engaged with engineering and construction project managers and examined and sampled excavated soils and bedrock. Students designed and implemented original research projects grounded in direct observation and empirical data collection. To extend their analyses beyond the traditional laboratory report, students developed artistic works that interpreted and communicated their findings through non-traditional formats. These creative components were intentionally structured to complement, not substitute, for scientific rigor. Students synthesized geotechnical data, assessed spatial relationships of geologic units, and created geologic interpretations of the subsurface in innovative and integrative ways.