Inclusive Fieldwork Toolkit - Community resource of technology to enable accessible fieldwork

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Part 1Field courses are a critical element of teaching and learning in the field-focused science disciplines. However, key sites are often inaccessible to students with disabilities. Students who cannot access a field location with their peers and instructors are given alternate assignments that do not provide the same level of inquiry-based, collaborative learning that students receive in the field. Technology-mediated approaches to collaborative fieldwork have been shown to be an effective means of enabling participation for students who would otherwise be excluded. However, the cost of appropriate communication technology to facilitate remote access is a barrier for many field course instructors. Establishing a set of loan equipment will enable broader accessibility and active participation in field-based teaching, learning and research for students and faculty with disabilities. A major outcome will be increasing the social inclusion within the field-based disciplines which will help attract other under-represented groups to study the geosciences and provide further opportunities to promote diversity and inclusion within higher education and the associated disciplines.Part 2This grant will establish an inclusive fieldwork toolkit to enable field-focused science instructors to integrate tried-and-tested assistive technology into their teaching and provide a basis for sharing inclusive fieldwork practices across institutions, promoting diversity and inclusion in the broader geoscience community. The established toolkit will support the following goals:- Provide access to equipment for inclusive field experiences.- Establish a community of student and faculty researchers engaged in accessibility-related projects who could then generate use-case reports and become system trainers for deployment at other institutions.- Create new opportunities for collaboration and innovation by reproducing instructional practices utilizing an established and evaluated set of equipment.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.