GP-UP: Building a Geoscience Field Learning Ecosystem for the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education

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This project will create a Geosciences Field Learning Ecosystem (GFLE) throughout the State of Pennsylvania (PA), expanding opportunities for Geoscience college students, faculty, and high school students (particularly the historically marginalized), and connecting PA universities and students more directly to the professional Geoscience community. The ecosystem itself is a network of collaborating university faculty, programs, administrators, working professionals, community stakeholders, and high school teachers / administrators committed to sharing resources and responsibilities to provide world-class field education for undergraduate Geoscience college students, and Geoscience field experiences for STEM-interested high school students. The PIs hypothesize that the network connecting pre-college (URM) students and teachers, faculty from PA’s universities, Geoscience majors, and working professionals, coupled with world-class Geoscience field experiences, will increase recruitment, retention, and preparedness of PA’s Geoscience workforce, and may serve as a model for other ecosystem collaborations within Pennsylvania’s State System of Higher Education and beyond. Creation of a Geosciences Field Learning Ecosystem (GFLE) in Pennsylvania will enhance collaboration among faculty, industry partners, state agencies, pre-college students, and Geoscience majors throughout PA; improve field-based learning to increase students’ preparedness for the workforce or graduate school; and introduce Geoscience career pathways to both Geoscience majors and pre-college students, especially the historically underrepresented. The GFLE has three primary tasks at its inception: 1) to build a statewide, collaborative Ecosystem Steering Committee that will identify and assess shared strengths, and merge opportunities and networks; 2) to create, implement, and assess a novel, service-learning-based, summer Geoscience Field Course (GFC) supported by collaboration of the entire ecosystem; and 3) to incorporate place-based, societally-relevant service-learning field experiences for high school students from PA’s URM population. By working together as faculty and administrators across multiple Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education universities, reaching out to both employers and high school students, and providing field instruction in a highly relevant service-learning context, the principal investigators plan to build a dynamic community focused on supporting amazing field learning opportunities and outreach to our current and prospective students, as well as potential employers.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.