Laura A. Guertin
Earth Sciences
*Note – this is the narrative statement I submitted when I went up for promotion to Distinguished Professor in Fall 2021. Although longer than a narrative would be for a traditional dossier for someone pre/post tenure, I wanted to share this summary that captures my 20+ years of experience at Penn State and in the geoscience community.
Introduction
When I began my position at Penn State Brandywine (then named Penn State Delaware County) in 2001, I knew I was joining a campus where I would be the only faculty member in my discipline. This required me to very quickly seek out collaborators and mentors across Penn State and outside the university. Through innovative partnerships allowing me to integrate my teaching, research, and service responsibilities, I find myself a part of and an active participant in the geoscience community at the national level, while still carrying out the land grant mission of our institution to serve the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and beyond.
I have taught 13 different introductory-level College of Earth & Mineral Sciences courses and courses from additional science-related disciplines, as well as mentored 55 undergraduate student researchers on 50 individual and group research projects. I am an author on 71 peer-reviewed journal articles (of these, 41 as first author, 22 as the only author), (co)author of 17 book chapters/contributions and field reports, and held positions ranging from the Principal Investigator to Senior Personnel for nine federally-funded research grants totaling $12.4 million. I have served in leadership roles for five national and international geoscience and science education organizations. But my accomplishments are more than these numbers. My scientific training and pedagogical research in the geosciences contributes to generating a science informed citizenry and improved physical and social spaces for a sustainable future for the environment and all of society.
Context
A quick note that throughout this dossier, there are references to my membership, participation, and leadership in groups focused on teaching and learning at community colleges. As the only earth scientist at Penn State Brandywine, and situated without a dedicated teaching classroom or research laboratory, my physical space on campus mirrors what exists for solo geologists at community college campuses. The focus of my teaching is introductory-level earth science courses for non-science majors, and until four years ago, Brandywine was a 100% commuter campus, both similar characteristics to the majority of community colleges. In many ways, my position aligns my teaching and student learning to the situation faced by faculty at two-year colleges/campuses (2YCs) rather than four-year institutions (4YCs). Certainly, Penn State has research expectations not required of community college faculty. I have been able to tap into the support and innovative teaching approaches among 2YC faculty, while developing my own research agenda in the area of geoscience pedagogy, and then share this research back with 2YCs and those that teach introductory-level courses at 4YCs. My success in teaching and research with and for students in their first two years has led to national recognition and service opportunities, ranging from being a faculty leader in the Supporting and Advancing Geoscience Education at Two-Year Colleges (SAGE 2YC) project, to the first division chair for the Geoscience Division of the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) to not come from a geoscience department or program.
There is also mention in this dossier of several occasions and organizations where I support girls/women in STEM, and I have recently increased my existing efforts in supporting minoritized individuals in the STEM pipeline. The geosciences is one of the least diverse STEM disciplines by gender and race (only 28% of geoscience workforce is female, 7.8% non-White). As a White female that has experienced harassment and barriers to success throughout my career, I have been extremely fortunate to have the strength and privilege to reach the rank of full professor in the geosciences (nationwide, only 19% of geoscience full professors are female). I am committed to introducing the next generation of geoscientists and oceanographers, as well as their parents/guardians and members of the general population, to my discipline through public speaking engagements and programs. From local events on campus and at museums, to contributing to the efforts of national organizations such as the Earth Science Women’s Network (ESWN) and the local Philadelphia chapter of 500 Women Scientists, I will continue to work towards making the geosciences an inclusive and safer discipline for all to participate. One example of my efforts in this area is my selection to the nationwide 500 Women Scientists Wiki Scholar Program in 2020, where I actively contribute to existing and building new Wikipedia biography pages for underrepresented earth scientists. I now serve in a mentor role for the Wiki Scholar Program to help others create new biography pages, as only 19% of Wikipedia biographies are about women, with significantly fewer pages about women in STEM.
My science foundation in geology and oceanography
My undergraduate degree is in geology with field experiences and internships in coastal geology. My Ph.D. is in marine geology and geophysics, and I continue to participate in oceanographic field expeditions since my time in graduate school. My oceanographic work is a combination of contributing to the data collection efforts on research vessels and sharing the work through blogging, social media, and communicating the science during and after the expeditions. In 2014, I received a U.S. Senate Certificate of Special Recognition for my work at sea on a hydrographic survey of areas impacted by Hurricane Sandy on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Ship Thomas Jefferson. I am scheduled to head out to sea again with NOAA (once COVID conditions have cleared), and I am excited to be a part of the team heading out to the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean on the ship JOIDES Resolution in April-June 2022 to resample at the legacy collection sites that provided the first seafloor samples for the evidence of the theory of plate tectonics. I share not only the science but the process of oceanographic fieldwork in a range of forums, including a 2015 invitation to the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC to co-present with Rear Admiral (RDML) Samuel DeBow on hydrographic surveying with NOAA. I am looking forward to my recent three-year appointment on the U.S. Advisory Committee for Scientific Ocean Drilling (USAC), which is the national advisory committee for U.S. participation in the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP).
Teaching philosophy
The classes I teach at Penn State Brandywine are introductory-level earth science, geoscience, and geography courses that satisfy general education (GN) requirements for non-STEM majors. As the only earth scientist at Brandywine and the only full-time instructor that teaches just GN courses for non-STEM majors, the student population in my courses is unique. Instead of teaching first-year students and having my course serve as a “discovery” course for potential, future majors in the College of Earth & Mineral Sciences, my courses typically fill with third and fourth-year students trying to complete their GN requirements before graduation. This offers opportunities and challenges, as my students have already completed several semesters and are aware of what it takes to be successful in college, yet my course is never a priority for students, as they are now in upper-division courses and focused intently on major requirements. I am mindful of this as I design my courses..
Each semester, I begin my course design with the following questions: What do I want my students to learn? What are the essential knowledge and skill sets students should leave my course with? Then, after clearly defining these goals, my next step is to explore data-informed pedagogical practices and the wide range of technological tools available to see, from a teaching and learning standpoint, which can assist myself and my students in achieving these goals. As I teach not future scientists but citizens who make purchases, consume resources, and vote on interfaces between earth science and society, one of the transferrable skills I develop with students is their information literacy. For over a decade, I have been coordinating with the faculty librarians on campus to integrate a week-long course unit on the information cycle, how best to utilize the libraries databases for research, and how to evaluate and cite sources. I also build the science literacy of students with hands-on exercises in the classroom and outdoors in the field, through the utilization of data visualizations, and with opportunities to apply what they have learned through creation of a product that is shared with others. The Brandywine Writing Studio and Penn State Media Commons are consistent collaborators in my assignment designs and provide support for students ranging from consultations to facilitated peer reviews.
It is important to me that students do not keep their learning of earth science between myself and them during the 15-week semester. The small communications projects I incorporate into each course allows students to share their work and to engage with others to reinforce their own learning and to increase their confidence in learning and sharing science knowledge. The majority of my course offerings include a course-based research experience (CURE) or a community-based/service-learning experience. One example is an effort that extended across several semesters, where students created audio and print content for middle school teachers and students in the Philadelphia School District to serve as material for their classrooms. These materials were then posted online at the website for the Pennsylvania Earth Science Teachers Association (PAESTA), with one of the projects that focused on short sustainability reads being selected by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (a global initiative of the United Nations) as a case study for inclusion in the international resource, Accelerating education for the SDGs in universities.
For each of my courses, it starts with the design of a motivational syllabus to set the stage for student engagement and achievement. It continues with me utilizing proven pedagogical strategies for effective teaching and learning, and incorporating science/student identity and agency. I continue to participate in professional development opportunities to improve my teaching and help students learn not just the “what” of science but why it matters. For example, in Fall 2021, as I am teaching an asynchronous web course, I completed the Introduction to Quality Matters (QM) course to learn about research-supported standards and rubrics when designing an online course, and I attended additional geoscience workshops focused on being intentional with the incorporation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines and other ways to center identity and inclusive practices.
Mentoring undergraduate student researchers
In addition to discovery-based experiences I embed in my courses, I have mentored 55 undergraduate students on independent study and group research projects. The majority of the student researchers I work with are freshmen and sophomores, and I mentor them on their own projects separate from my pedagogical research. I am committed to having students see the research process through to completion, having students disseminate their work through a regional conference, and even lead or co-authorship on a publication suitable for publishing small projects, such as the Journal of the Pennsylvania Academy of Science, The Pennsylvania Geographer, and Pennsylvania Geology. At a minimum, I require students to write an abstract of their work and upload any additional dissemination materials in ScholarSphere (Penn State University Libraries institutional repository).
My research students have been successful earning honors and recognition for their independent study work, notably with two of my sophomore researchers being selected to participate in the Council on Undergraduate Research-Posters on the Hill event in Washington DC (2010, 2021) and another sophomore earning an Honorable Mention for high-quality research among the top 10% of all submissions to CUR Posters on the Hill (2013). Because of my success and record of engaging students in discovery-based projects in their first two years, I was invited by CUR and the House Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education Caucus to attend with Penn State Brandywine student researchers a Congressional briefing on undergraduate research and American innovation, held in the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington DC (2010). I was the only faculty with students invited from any university nationwide to respond to questions from Congressional staffers, interns, and the media around interdisciplinary undergraduate research, getting students started with undergraduate research early in their undergraduate careers, and creating a synergy between teaching and research for faculty and students to create innovation.
In addition to independent projects, I have mentored group research and creative experiences that have been successful in generating recognition at the national level. One example of a group project grew from two students that were enolled in one of my earth science courses, where we collaborated with the Society of Exploration Geophysicists (SEG- non-profit discipline organization with >20,000 members) to generate new wiki pages for their science-focused wiki. After the semester was over, the students (geography major and communications major) continued to work with me through the summer, supported with funding from the National Science Foundation, to continue to develop wiki pages appropriate for introductory-level geoscience courses. Their work led to conference presentations by each student, one campus and one national recognition for the student researchers, and I was honored with the SEG Wiki Champion Award.
Another example of a student project that has made national impact was the summer REU experience of a rising sophomore at Brandywine that I mentored as a part of the Project Drawdown Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program in Summer 2019 held at Penn State University Park. The student conducted 13 interviews and generated an eleven episode podcast series of global warming solutions throughout the state of Pennsylvania. While presenting about her podcast series at the international Research to Action Drawdown Conference, the Executive Director of the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) asked the student to attend the NCSE 2020 conference to present her work and to record podcasts of the scientists and policymakers presenting at the event. Additional campus students (a total of two sophomores and one freshman) filled out the podcast team and travelled to the NCSE 2020 conference in Washington DC and generated a podcast series that now resides on the NCSE website.
I look forward to continuing to create opportunities for students in their first two years to not only have a research/community experience, but to find ways to build upon these so that the students are successful entering research groups upon transfer to the University Park campus to complete their degrees, or to prepare them for senior-level capstone/thesis work at any institution.
Integration of teaching and research
When I began my position at Penn State Brandywine, I shifted the main focus of my research from marine geology to a pedagogical one, specifically how technology can enhance teaching and student learning of earth science content in introductory-level courses. This research direction has not only benefitted my own courses at Brandywine but has impacted the broader geoscience educational community, even recognized at the national level by the Geological Society of America with the Biggs Earth Science Teaching Award (2009).
While at Penn State, I have been a (Co-)Principal Investigator on >$8.7 million offederally funded grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Environmental Protection Agency to improve geoscience instruction and opportunities for underrepresented groups of instructors and students in middle schools through universities. Including the grants where I served as Senior Personnel and a paid sub-contractor, the total is >$12.5 million of funded research.
I have intentionally targeted a range of publication outlets for the dissemination of my geoscience education research. As there is only one discipline-based journal for higher education research (Journal ofGeoscience Education), I have published my pedagogical research papers in the research sections of additional journals such as the Journal of Sustainability Education, Journal of College Science Teaching, and the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching. I also have pedagogy-themed papers that fall under the category of “best practices” that are an outcome of two NSF projects where I mentored middle and high school teachers and graduate students to share their curricular innovations in peer-reviewed teacher journals, such as The Earth Scientist.
I have (co)authored book chapters on geoscience pedagogy, models of undergraduate research, and women in STEM. Two of the geoscience education resources I developed and contributed to the peer-reviewed National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT) Teach the Earth digital library collection were named to the Exemplary Teaching Collection, a designation given to fewer than 20% of the >3,000 materials in their database. My research with educational technology has been highlighted in articles by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pew Research Center, and other outlets. In addition to my work appearing in books and peer reviewed journal articles in the geosciences and the adjacent field of geography, my pedagogical work has been cited by researchers in the fields of political science, business, nursing, special education, tourism, and more.
My innovations and contributions to the scholarship of geoscience education led to the American Geophysical Union, an international organization of 60,000 earth and space scientists, inviting me to join their blogging community as their only blogger on education and educational technology. Since 2014 and continuing to the present, I have authored at GeoEd Trek (https://blogs.agu.org/geoedtrek/) more than 300 blog posts, with the blog receiving more than 40,000 page views in 2020. The blog was selected for the Dean’s List of 50 Must-Read Higher Education IT Blogs by EdTech: Focus on Higher Education (2015). My posts that focus on NOAA’s meteorologic and oceanographic data resulted in RDML Tim Gallaudet, Assistant Secretary and Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, inviting me to his office in Washington DC for a meeting to personally thank me for blogging about NOAA’s work and global impact. Being invited by the Acting Director of NOAA to his office at the Department of Commerce for a 30-minute conversation on the role of NOAA and connections to science education and communication has been a highlight of my career.
Leadership and service
In addition to authoring the education blog for the American Geophysical Union (AGU), I have served on AGU’s Meetings Committee and various AGU search committees and task forces. I recently concluded serving as Chair of AGU’s Virtual Engagement and Sustainable Meetings Advisory Group, a group of 14 scientists from seven nations and different career stages tasked with drawing up recommendations for how AGU can engage in sustainable practices, effective mentoring, seamless collaboration, and inclusive practices for researchers from across the globe that participate in any event that is a part of AGU’s meetings portfolio. In addition to my service with AGU, I was an invited panelist for the joint AGU-JpGU (Japan Geophysical Union) Great Debate on Geoscience and Society, and I was selected to participate in the year-long AGU Voices for Science Advocacy Program.
I have served in a variety of leadership and mentoring roles at the national level outside of AGU, including as an elected councilor and/or committee member with the National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT) and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). I have been most active with the Geoscience Division of the Council on Undergraduate Research (GeoCUR), serving as an elected councilor for 15 years and past division chair and member of CUR’s Executive Committee. With GeoCUR, I was a co-founder and chair of committees that established national awards in the geosciences for undergraduate research mentoring and excellence in student research. In addition to my mentoring activities with CUR, I was invited by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to join the Committee for the Convocation on Integrating Discovery-Based Research into the Undergraduate Curriculum, resulting in a multi-day workshop and publications. I was selected as a mentor for the Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL) Leadership Institute for STEM faculty, and I was invited by the National Science Foundation to serve as a mentor for the National Science Foundation Geoscience Ideas Lab.
My newest service/leadership role has been through the Unlearning Racism in Geoscience (URGE) program, a NSF-funded effort where I organized and continue to lead eleven other individuals such as myself, the only geoscientist at their institution, to come together to deepen our knowledge on the effects of racism on students and faculty within BIPOC communities in the geosciences, and how we can include anti-racist practices in our teaching to provide a model that can be shared across universities nationwide. Our 30+ page resource document was released in mid-July 2021, and as of September 15 has been accessed over 260 times. We are continuing to meet monthly to add to this resource document and to disseminate our work at national geoscience conferences.
The integration of creative work with science communication and outreach
In addition to disseminating scholarship relating to science and communication through outlets such as AAC&U’s The Academic Minute radio program, I have presented at several Philadelphia city-wide events for public outreach (Taste of Science, Nerd Nite, Soapbox Science), including an invitation to speak at the Philadelphia March for Science/Rally for Science in 2018. Also in 2018, I started a new direction of sharing science, and I credit my time at a field program with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON) for taking my efforts in science communication and outreach in a new direction with science storytelling through the creation of quilts. I have completed my first quilt collection titled Stitching Hope for the Louisiana Coast that shares stories of adaptation and resilience in an environment facing environmental challenges such as sea-level rise and coastal subsidence. I started displaying my quilts at conferences and in the community, and with public gatherings on hold, I have created short video clips and virtual galleries that describe the quilts and their stories to broaden their dissemination. I was interviewed about my artistic representations of scientific data and stories for articles in The New York Times and other outlets, and I am the featured quilter in the Smithsonian Magazine article, “Inside the Growing Movement to Share Science Through Quilting” (September 2021). The publication of the Smithsonian Magazine article immediately led to be being invited for a 30-minute television interview for Innovation Showcase that will air on public access networks across the state of Massachusetts, and a 20-minute interview on the radio show Saturday Morning with Kim Hill for Radio New Zealand (RNZ), both scheduled for October 2021. I have been invited/selected to join national science storytelling events to share the stories of my quilts through Story Collider and Ignite. Recently, I completed a second quilt collection, composed of nine mini-quilts that highlight solutions to global warming as defined by Project Drawdown. I was invited to share this quilt collection in a virtual gallery for a regional climate science educators conference hosted by NOAA. My next collection will highlight the legacy and new science findings on the JOIDES Resolution expedition I will be sailing on in 2022.
In addition to my GeoEd Trek blog for the American Geophysical Union written for an audience of scientists and educators, I maintain a second blog titled Journeys of Dr. G (https://journeysofdrg.org/). I started the blog in 2012 with the intended audience to be my students and anyone else interested in learning more about the life of a scientist. To break the stereotypical view of a scientist, I blog about my personal experiences at workshops, conferences, and in the field, exploring museum displays, attending lectures, and share my science-themed art via crocheting and quilting. I had no idea of the reach of this blog until I received an email in 2016 from the Executive Director of MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group. He had an author that just finished writing a novel for middle-grade readers about a young girl who gets into trouble for a school essay in which she claims to have accompanied a scientist who is her hero on a geological expedition to Iceland. The scientist is based on me and my blog posts about my field experiences in Iceland, and he asked if the book could use the name “Dr. G” and if I could vet the geologic information in the story. It is an honor to be part of the book The Half-True Lies of Cricket Cohen by Catherine Lloyd Burns, published in 2017.
Summary
My teaching, research, and service efforts are tightly integrated, which is a strength for my identity and impact across multiple communities. These crossovers of my work led to being recognized with Penn State’s President’s Award for Excellence in Academic Integration (2020), honored with an INSIGHT Into Diversity magazine’s Inspiring Women in STEM Award (Top 100 Women in STEM across the United States, 2015), and elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America (GSA, 2015). The short citation for my GSA Fellowship reads, “For her complete devotion to undergraduate education on the local and national stage, for her dedication to training the next set of geoscience teachers, for her cutting-edge research involving technology in geoscience education, and for her leadership in the geoscience educational community. ” As I celebrate these successes, there is much more work I wish to complete. The pandemic and its abrupt shift to fully remote instruction presented opportunities and challenges for effective instruction and access that needs to be researched. The geosciences suffer from a lack of diversity in its faculty and student population, and I will continue to contribute my voice and more of my efforts to creating safer, supportive, and sustainable spaces for everyone in my classes and classes at other institutions to succeed in the discipline. Although I am proud of what I have accomplished at the national level, I will continue to develop, to research, and to engage with high-impact practices and serve in leadership roles to benefit my discipline and society.