Next Steps for Community Infrastructure Supporting Geoscience Education

Abstract:

Over the past two decades there has been substantial investment, both by federal agencies and through the collective energy of the geoscience education community, to improve undergraduate geoscience education through professional development opportunities, creation of exemplary materials, and sharing of those resources online. A key enabler in many of these efforts has been the infrastructure provided by the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College, often in partnership with the National Association of Geoscience Teacher (NAGT). This infrastructure includes both a platform for sharing teaching resources and expertise as well as wide array of community collaboration opportunities. In November 2019, through a workshop process, a set of community priorities for the future development of this infrastructure was articulated (https://serc.carleton.edu/geo_ed_infrastructure/synthesis.html).

The top priority identified by the workshop participants was improving the tools and processes that enable educators to discover relevant resources from across the breadth of SERC-hosted projects. Those resources are currently distributed across a variety of project websites and educators would benefit from new mechanisms for navigating the entire corpus: mechanisms that would guide an educator to the resource that best meets their current needs irrespective of its originating project. A strongly complementary second priority is to build explicit connections to research and education partners across the geosciences. These connections could foster an environment where geoscience educators looking to share with their peers would be exposed to and more easily understand the full landscape of geoscience education resources and activities. SERC is now working to move these priorities forward through new technical development and community collaborations.