FOSTERING POSTSECONDARY STUDENTS’ FEELINGS OF CONNECTION TO PLACE WITHOUT A SITE VISIT IN A LARGE INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE COURSE

Place-based education (PBE) frameworks emphasize the role of an individual student’s perceived personal connection to and experience interacting with a “place” as essential to learning (Semken et al. 2017). However, competing student demands (e.g., employment, elder care), field safety issues, student accommodation needs, and site visit costs may hinder an instructor’s capacity to engage students in place-based pedagogies, particularly in large introductory courses (Shinneman et al. 2020). This intervention study aimed to test whether or not students’ sense of place could be enriched without a course-led site visit through a place-centered independent research project in an introductory geoscience course for majors and non-majors at a research-intensive institution in Canada. This intervention was free-choice in that students were free to choose a place to research. Students were encouraged to select a place that had special meaning or was important to them, but they were not restricted by any specific selection criteria. The project consisted of four written assignments, the last of which included a set of embedded assessment questions about their perceptions of learning, connection to place, and evaluation of their experience participating in the project. Student responses to their first written assignment, in which they described why they chose their place, were qualitatively coded using an a priori sense of place codebook. Responses (n=128) to an embedded assessment question from the fourth written assignment (about feelings of connection to their place as a result of the project) were tallied. Other student response data are described elsewhere (Lukes & Gilley, in preparation). Preliminary results indicate that the majority of students report having chosen a place they had an existing sense of place about, but also report a greater feeling of connection to the place as a result of the project. Results from this study have pedagogical implications for introductory geoscience courses. Results suggest that instructors can enhance students’ feelings of connection to a place through learning geoscience content without taking them on a site visit by leveraging student choice and students’ existing sense of places. Future studies could explore the relationship between feelings of connection to place and persistence in geoscience.