The Rural Education Center (REC) at Kansas State University and the Center for Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS) at the University of Kansas will develop project SOARING: Sharing Opportunities, Approaches, and Resources in New Geo-teaching. The primary goal of Project SOARING is to provide training for secondary (middle and high school) teachers and students on the latest geotechnology for the purpose of increasing students’ desire to pursue geoscience degrees and careers. Specifically, the PIs target geotechnology applications of airborne remote sensing for geological applications. The PIs have partnered with nine school districts in which they have ongoing partnerships and that represent a diverse group of rural schools across central and western Kansas. Most of these schools have significant underrepresented populations, particularly Hispanic/Latinx populations. The KSU REC will be the lead organization, facilitating most of the grant, recruiting the teachers and students to participate in the project activities, providing support to teachers when they are in their classrooms and connecting teachers with the KSU Summer STEM Institute (SSI). The CReSIS at KU will provide content in the geosciences, resources, and instruction regarding the geoscience technology.
Underrepresented groups in rural communities face multiple barriers to geoscience careers in comparison to their classmates in urban and suburban schools. With these purposes in mind, the objectives of Project SOARING are to: 1) train rural teachers to engage rural secondary students in geosciences activities and geotechnology; 2) to expose diverse rural secondary students to meaningful geoscience learning experiences; 3) build students’ skills and competency for geoscience degrees and careers; 4) increase the students’ desire to pursue degrees and geoscience-related careers. Rural teachers and their diverse rural students were chosen for this grant because: 1) many rural schools face teacher vacancies in all STEM related fields; 2) rural students typically score lower on STEM assessments; 3) few Earth Science classes are taught in secondary schools, especially in rural schools. The proposal outlines a series of approaches to engage twenty-seven secondary school teachers (9 per year) and potentially over four thousand students with geotechnology and resources. Additionally, the project will seek to recruit participation by female students, Hispanic/Latinx and minority students.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
