Personal, cultural, and geographic connections to geoscience

In this issue

Words like connections and perspectives weave through this issue, with each paper showing in its unique way how context and culture shape students’ relationships with geoscience.

The interplay between Traditional and Western STEM knowledge is the focus of two papers that explore how Indigenous identities bring meaning to geoscience content and training. Reano and Hasara evaluated an Earth Day geoscience program (including the “Rock House Activity” seen on the cover of this issue) hosted and attended by Acoma Pueblo community members, asking: what connections did community members make between their culture and Western geoscience concepts? Eitel and coauthors followed Native and non-Native high school students participating on Nimiipuu ancestral homelands in a natural-resources workforce development program, a complex learning environment that integrated Indigenous with Western STEM knowledge. Both studies consider how a sense of place, the transfer of intergenerational knowledge, and cultural responsibility contribute to learners’ engagement with geoscience.

Early field experiences help students connect to their environment and begin to apply their geoscience skills. Less clear is how to introduce these experiences in an effective progression that supports a diverse student population. In a broad survey of undergraduate geoscience programs, Shinneman asked colleagues to reflect on their introductory field offerings, as a way to see patterns behind the motivations, barriers, and approaches to early field experiences. In a focused look at an undergraduate summer field program, Fairchild and coauthors explored the effects of specific field situations on marginalized students, particularly in terms of their evolving self-efficacy and intent to pursue a geoscience career.

Students bring to the classroom unique abilities and perceptions which influence their connection to concepts and new ways of thinking. Three papers in this issue examine student perspectives that may influence their uptake of geoscience concepts and persistence in the discipline. Goldhagen and coauthors targeted perspective-taking as a spatial skill of fundamental importance to geoscience, measuring its relationship to academic achievement and its potential to be developed during an undergraduate geoscience module. Klavon and coauthors followed middle-school students in an Earth science classroom, with an eye on how students’ prior experience with controversial geoscience topics affect their evaluation of scientific evidence, and the effectiveness of autonomy-supported instructional environments in strengthening the same students’ evaluation skills. Finally, McNeal and coauthors used drawing as a way to understand how undergraduate students’ pre- and post-course conceptions of Earth scientists reflected the students’ shifting identification with geoscience as a broad pursuit.

Together, the papers in this issue recognize how our varied personal and cultural connections to geoscience are foundational to our learning of it.

Editorial transitions

As part of our annual team rotation, we are pleased to welcome two new Associate Editors to JGE: Andrea Gerbaudo from the University of Turin, and Clara Vasconcelos from the University of Porto. Associate Editors serve three-year terms. Anyone interested in serving next term as an AE can find out more at https://nagt.org/nagt/jge/apply_AE.html.

Peggy McNeal and Katherine Ryker finished their AE terms in December, and I would like to thank both of them for their service to JGE.

I want to recognize Kim Hannula, whose term as Editor-in-Chief ended in December, for her dedication to JGE and the geoscience education community, and for her guidance in passing me the baton. Education has been a unifying theme over my career, and I am grateful for this opportunity to keep learning. I look forward to working with JGE’s authors, reviewers, and editors through my term.