NSF funding is being used to support a Geoscience Education in the National Park System workshop on October 13-15, 2010. This workshop, being held in conjunction with the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new interactive Trail of Time Geoscience Exhibition at the Grant Canyon, brings together interpretative experts from the National Park Service, experts in cognition and misconceptions about geological concepts such as 'deep time', informal science education experts, decision-makers, and members of the media. The goals of the workshop are to foster development of a cohesive and innovative approach to using National Park System resources to promote geoscience education and raise awareness of the importance of, and barriers to, geoscience education.
" Intellectual Merit: Grand Canyon National Park and the University of New Mexico, with support from the NSF, hosted a Grand Opening of the Trail of Time Geoscience Exhibition Oct 13-15, 2010, at Grand Canyon (http://tot.unm.edu/). This Exhibition recently won the 2011 First Place Award for Wayside Exhibits from the National Association for Interpretation. The Trail of Time is a fully accessible interpretive walking timeline trail located between Grand Canyon Village and Yavapai Geology Museum at the South Rim of Grand Canyon. It utilizes the unique vistas and rocks at Grand Canyon to help visitors ponder, explore, and understand the magnitude of geologic time and the stories encoded by Grand Canyon rocks and landscapes. Geologic time is immensely long; the 4.56-km-long (about 3 mile) trail is marked every meter, with each meter = 1 million years of our 4.56 billion year Earth history. Viewing tubes, activities, and interpretive materials help visitors connect the rocks visible in Grand Canyon to their place along the geologic timeline. The Trail of Time is designed to engage visitors with culturally responsive and inclusive content, and is part of a research program in science education aimed at understanding and helping improve public cognition of geologic time—the vital, and difficult-to-comprehend, connection between human time scales and the million year heartbeat of the Earth. Broader Impact: Leveraging the Grand Opening event, our NSF-funded workshop involved 120 participants who discussed and developed plans for new approaches to Geoscience Education here and elsewhere in the National Park System. Numerous ideas were formulated that build on The Trail of Time Exhibition’s interpretation themes of Geologic Time and Earth Processes. Understanding Earth (the science of Geology) is ever more important as human societies grow and flourish on our planet of limited resources. Education and research on time, climate and environmental change, natural resources, and the interactions of humans in the Earth system are increasingly urgent topics for public science literacy, and all necessitate an understanding of deep time. Additional formal and informal science education efforts within the National Park System, a premier venue for natural science interpretation and informal science education, can have an important impact by giving visitors of all ages activity-based visceral understandings of the geology and natural history encoded in our national iconic landscapes. The opening of the Trail of Time Exhibition and accompanying workshop were held in conjunction with Earth Science Week (sponsored by the American Geological Institute). Publications: Crow, R., Karlstrom, K.E., Crossey, L.J., Semken, S., Perry, D., Williams, M., and Bryan, J., 2011, It’s about time: Innovations in geoscience education at Grand Canyon: Legacy, v. 22, p. 26-27. Symposium organizers (*= Principal Investigators) Karl Karlstrom* and Laura Crossey*, Ryan Crow, University of New Mexico Steve Semken, Arizona State University Judy Bryan and Carl Bowman, Interpretation Division, Grand Canyon National Park Deborah Perry, Selinda Research Associates Mike Williams, University of Massachusetts.
