Sensemaking about Place
Empowering educators to act as future change agents to engage school-wide transitions to local phenomena-based science.
Sensemaking about Place (SAP) provides professional development support and study to rural elementary schools’ administrators and teachers, so they can incorporate local, real-life earth sciences into their existing curriculums. The project brings together a cohort of elementary teachers and administrators and researchers from Montana, Maine, and Hawaii who will support one another while comparing and contrasting challenges and opportunities in rural education focused on place-based phenomena. Teachers will learn to adapt national materials to local scientific phenomena to produce more place-based and locally relevant materials.
Over three years, two teachers and one administrator at five rural Maine elementary schools will engage in high-quality science instructional units (10 teachers and 5 administrators in total). Teachers will work toward developing their own customized unit based on local scientific phenomena.
Read the details about joining SaP in the project overview, and apply below by May 30.
Scientific Sensemaking About Place-based Phenomena: Mobilizing Rural Elementary Teacher Learning to Propel School-Wide Transformation is supported by the National Science Foundation under award number 2405436.
Maine contacts are Danielle Frank (dfrank@mmsa.org) and Kim Charmatz (kcharmatz@mmsa.org). Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the National Science Foundation.
