Empowering Educators 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 and Maine 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.

MMSA Project Staff

Science Education Researcher

STEM Education Specialist

Research Associate


