NASA at AGU: Deepening Participation in Place-based, Data-Rich Earth Science Teaching and Learning through Inter-Organizational Collaboration

The NASA Science Activation program's Place-Based Learning to Advance Connections, Education, and Stewardship (PLACES) project provides opportunities for teachers across the country to learn how to effectively implement place-based, data-rich instruction focused on real, relevant, and meaningful global and local phenomena.

The PLACES project team recently attended the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference in San Francisco in December, 2023 and presented “Deepening Participation in Place-based, Data-Rich Earth Science Teaching and Learning through Inter-Organizational Collaboration: Sharing the PLACES Process” session. This presentation demonstrated some of the processes used by the diverse PLACES team and communicated some lessons learned that other diverse projects could use.

During the session, led by Sara Salisbury from WestEd and Zulema Gonzalez, a partner teacher from Assurance Learning Academy in San Fernando, CA, participants (a mix of educators and professional geoscientists) heard about the PLACES co-design process. In this presentation, Ms. Gonzalez shared some of her experiences being on the PLACES team as a partner teacher, including how she was able to leverage NASA materials (e.g. Global Learning and Observation to Benefit the Environment, GLOBE, protocols and Subject Matter Experts) and participate in the iterative process of developing a teaching case focused on her place-based, data-rich instruction experiences.

Many thanks to all the project partners, including staff from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Northern Arizona University, Assurance Learning Academy, and GLOBE Mission Earth, for their contributions to the project and the presentation.

PLACES is supported by NASA under cooperative agreement award number 80NSSC22M0005 and is part of NASA’s Science Activation Portfolio.