THE PLACES PROJECT: WORKING TO SUPPORT PLACE-BASED, DATA-RICH TEACHING AND LEARNING WITH GEOSCIENCE EDUCATORS

The NASA-funded PLACES project — Broadening Data Fluency Through the Integration of NASA Assets and Place-Based Learning to Advance Connections, Education, and Stewardship is a research-based project aimed to equip educators teaching geoscience topics with knowledge, skills, and educational resources needed to successfully integrate NASA assets into science teaching and learning to help their students confidently use data to explore questions and solve problems related to places meaningful to their culture and communities, build their STEM identities, and engage effectively in civic life. PLACES was born out of a partnership between WestEd’s Making Sense of SCIENCE (MSS) professional learning program and is a co-design effort with several of NASA’s Science Activation projects and partners – Northern Arizona University, Gulf of Maine Research Institute, and several Science Activation NASA partners. The project team also works alongside educators to develop teaching cases that serve as tools for teaching and learning in our professional learning experiences.

The project just completed the first professional learning pilot with 20 middle school and high school educators who teach geoscience topics. These teachers will continue their professional learning in a Community of Practice with us during the 2023-2024 academic year. When selecting our pilot teachers, we focused on an opportunity to broaden participation of educators and youth who bring a diversity of cultures, languages, and meanings of “place” to their understanding of science, including those underrepresented in STEM, such as Indigenous youth and recent immigrants.

Evaluation surveys from the pilot, as well as student work from teaching cases, have provided critical insights into productive approaches to support geoscience teachers’ as they engage their students in place-based, data-rich instruction. Three potentially effective instructional strategies for supporting place-based and data-rich teaching and learning emerged during our pilot observations:

1. Supporting the selection of “place-based” phenomena.
2. Building confidence for utilizing complex data sets that include multiple entryways and representations to explore a place.
3. Structuring activities to highlight the bi-directional relationship between place and data.

We will be sharing more details of our findings during the session.