Leveraging Sense of Place in Geoscience Teaching and Assessment

We teach Earth, ecological, and environmental sciences in and about places: localities imbued with humanistic as well as scientific meanings. People form emotional attachments to meaningful places. Sense of place (SoP) encompasses meanings and attachments, encapsulating human-place connections. Place-based science teaching is situated in local environments and intentionally leverages the SoP of students and teachers. Authentically place-based teaching is experiential and trans-disciplinary, infused by the coincident natural and cultural landscapes under study. It has been advocated for its relevance to sustainability and for its potential to better engage underrepresented students, particularly those whose cultures are rooted in the study places. However, any student must be able to find meanings in and form attachments to the setting. Place-based curriculum design and pedagogy must be informed not only by scientific knowledge of places, but also by the humanistic meanings and attachments also affixed to them. Building and enriching SoP is an authentic learning outcome that can be assessed formatively and summatively with mixed methods. SoP is well defined in theory; it can be empirically characterized in different groups, and individual and group variations can be quantified psychometrically.

Our experiments in place-based geoscience teaching and assessment have been sited in three distinct formal settings in the Southwest USA: at a rural Tribal College, on the urban campus of a large state university, and a teacher enhancement program at a rural, minority-majority K-12 school district. Psychometric surveys of the diverse participants reveal variable prior SoP and limited correlation with expected predictors such as ethnicity, but pre- and post-course surveys show significant relative increases in SoP. Qualitative studies (participant observations, analysis of student products, and semi-structured exit interviews) indicate increased knowledge of and richer emotional attachments to places as direct outcomes of the teaching method.