About SERC

The Science Education Resource Center is a grant-funded office at Carleton College, founded to improve education in the Earth sciences and beyond. Today we are a team of 19 educators, researchers and technical specialists who have worked with over 100 award winning education projects across the STEM disciplines and allied fields. Engaging participants from more than 1,000 institutions of higher education, as well as K-12 curriculum developers and teachers, we have created one of the world's largest collections of pedagogic resources. In collaboration with instructors, institutions and national organizations:

We support educators...

We disseminate knowledge...

We engage the community...

...by planning and hosting transformative workshops for educators, conducting research to develop effective pedagogy, and testing the most effective ways of implementing change in the classroom.

We collect and host teaching resources, many vetted through a peer-review system, on a wide variety of disciplines and topics. We also work with professional societies and educational organizations to improve education through collective action. Serving as the Executive Office of the National Association for Geoscience Teachers, we advocate for improved science education at all levels.

...by acting as a hub for research, resources, face-to-face meetings and online events.

Our content management system, Serckit, is a tool we use successfully to both gather and disseminate information. We host more than 31,000 pages of content written and reviewed by the higher education community. Using digital library tools, we organize and customize this information to promote sharing across disciplines. These resources are accessed by more than 5 million people each year, including more than 1/3 from outside of North America.

We have supported more than 250 workshops and webinars to help educators use those materials effectively, and we organize the annual Earth Educators Rendezvous. As of 2015, SERC participants have come from more than 1,000 different higher education institutions. We partner with professional societies, and work closely with diverse organizations such as NAGT, AGI, and more to bring improvements in education to the broadest possible audience.

...through extensive, active networks that provide our partners with a place to find collaborators, resources and colleagues.

SERC brings together face-to-face and virtual interactions with tools for collaboration to create content-rich, active, community networks. We manage InTeGrate, the NSF-funded STEP center in the Geosciences, where interdisciplinary teams are developing materials and model programs to transform the opportunities for undergraduates to learn about the Earth. We partner with professional societies, institutions and projects supporting interactions within and across communities as diverse as economics faculty, numeracy advocates, climate educators in all venues, geoscience department chairs, leaders of STEM education centers and leaders of STEM education efforts within disciplinary professional societies.

By partnering with SERC, you become a part of this network, gaining access not only to our expertise, but the knowledge of the people we work with.