This Planning Grant is exploring the educational potential of using an unusual landscape setting to provide elementary students and their teachers with place- and field-based research experiences, as a tool for engaging them in STEM career paths and enhancing their science content knowledge, creativity, and critical thinking skills. The Nature Conservancy manages a wetlands site in Shady Valley, Tennessee that is a rare, ecologically-important mountain bog. The site offers excellent conditions for sediment coring, which provides students with the opportunity to learn about landscape development and reconstruct the Holocene environment via palynological investigation. Integration of historical perspectives on land-use changes, student forecasting of future landscapes, and development of a video demonstrating age-appropriate sampling strategies are potential strategies for augmenting student data collection and analysis activities. Planning activities will focus on a series of meetings between geoscientists, learning theory professionals, curriculum developers, mass communication professionals, videographers, members of the Tennessee and North Carolina Geographic Alliances, elementary school teachers and administrators, and the Nature Conservancy, in order to clarify needs, goals, and potential partnerships.
