PLACE, PARTNERSHIPS, AND PRACTICE – GEOHERITAGE EDUCATION INITIATIVES IN MICHIGAN’S KEWEENAW REGION

The Keweenaw Peninsula in Upper Michigan sits at the heart of the Midcontinent Rift and is renowned for the world’s largest accessible native copper deposit and Lake Superior, the largest freshwater lake on Earth. The geologic underpinnings of the Keweenaw have fostered relationships with land and water for millennia and has imbued our place with significant sites that provide opportunity to broaden both Earth science and cultural literacy. Geoheritage offers opportunities to learn from the many stories, the issues impacting our community, and opportunities for sustainable economic development - all rooted in Earth systems processes. Further, as geoheritage emphasizes the importance of the varied personal values people have for geologic features, we explore this concept as an effective geoscience communication tool that nurtures place-based learning experiences and our relationships with landscape. A wide range of community partners offer different perspectives and values that inform a deepened understanding of our place. Geoheritage education opportunities in the Keweenaw are thereby rooted in principles of reciprocity, mutual beneficence, respect for work and one another, and reverence for our place that acknowledge and reflect these varied values. Through these partnerships we explore place-based education opportunities that engage learners in acknowledging how the underpinning geology of the region has influenced human relationships with landscape and how humans have in turn influenced the landscape. The dynamic and interconnected physiographic and human stories serve as the foundation of our landscape’s past, present, and future and help centralize and elevate other ways of knowing about our place within the K-12 education community and informal learning audiences. We highlight examples of how these partnerships inform teacher professional learning and student internship experiences focused on the rich geoheritage of our place. These programs honor the wisdom of our landscape, the varied relationships we have with the landscape, and how we can work together in a good way to elevate Earth science literacy.