About the Program

Welcome to Learning Landscapes, a collaborative effort between the University of Vermont's Geology Department, Education Department, and the Center for Teaching and Learning, as well as the Science Education Research Center at Carleton College. The effort is supported by a National Science Foundation grant to Paul Bierman and Christine Massey for Educational Materials Development from the Course Currliculum and Laboratory Improvement program. Click here (1.6MB PDF) to read the grant application.

The learning modules presented on this web site use both current and historical photographic imagery, and the stories these images convey, to address directly the problem that Earth Science is considered irrelevant by many people. Images linking human actions and surface processes allow everyone to understand the importance and concept of change over time while adding a human element to the learning process. Many of the images are drawn from the Landscape Change Program archive, another NSF funded initiative.

Our objective is to demonstrate that people's interest, attention, and learning all increase when Earth Science is taught and learned visually in the context of the human experience. We expect the outcome of this work will be learners who recognize the relevance of Earth Science as a discipline and its ability to inform debate on a variety of pertinent societal issues.

We plan to accomplish our objective by developing, testing, and evaluating the web-based modules you can see on this site; each module is focused on different ways in which the Earth and people interact. This project targets the Earth Science (Geology and Geography) student population at the introductory level in order to make the broadest possible impact. Keep checking back, as this site and the modules it contains continue to grow and be refined over the next few years.