THE FUTURE OF GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION AT GRAND CANYON: MORE—AND MORE DIVERSE—LEARNERS WILL EXPERIENCE IT BY PLACE-BASED AND DIGITAL MEANS

Grand Canyon interweaves a natural landscape that encodes nearly two billion years of geological change and history with a cultural landscape that encodes the names, experiences, lives, and ideas of people from ancestral Native Americans, to explorers and settlers, to modern visitors from across the USA and around the world. Place-based ways of teaching thoughtfully integrate the pedagogically powerful attributes of natural and cultural landscapes in a place or region such as Grand Canyon, to motivate and facilitate learning and stewardship. Grand Canyon National Park has for a century hewed to place-based practice with interpretive programs and resources that have enabled millions of visitors to form and strengthen both intellectual and emotional connections to this exemplary National Park. Geological, cultural, and educational research continue to contribute to this mission. Now, advances in the technology of visualization and adaptive learning are bringing the pedagogical power of Grand Canyon to digital and online realms through both augmented and virtual field experiences. Further enriched with place-based content and methods, these innovative technologies offer the potential to enable many millions more—including historically underserved learners—to explore and learn from the natural and cultural landscapes of Grand Canyon, including its most physically inaccessible places. Research demonstrates that digital and online field experiences at Grand Canyon can complement and stimulate interest in in-person field experiences there. Further research and development by our group and other workers are directed toward rendering digital and online field experiences ever more authentic and place-based, and more freely accessible to educators, students, and the public.