Vote for Dr. Hawthorne, NCGE Board of Directors
I’d appreciate your vote for the Board of Directors of the National Council for Geographic Education.
Vote here: https://ncge.org/ncge-leadership/ncge-slates-bios-statements/
I am running for the NCGE Board of Directors. As the major geographic education organization in the US, this group means the world to me and all geographic educators. I’ve valued working with the NCGE community for the past decade. Please vote at the link above. Whether a vote for me, or a vote for the additional incredible candidates, I hope you’ll vote to support the next generation of geography and science. Here is my biographical statement. Thanks for reading and for voting! Shares welcome.
Dr. Timothy L. Hawthorne: 2022 National Geographic Explorer, GeoBus Founder, and Associate Professor of GIS at the University of Central Florida
As an optimistic and energetic community geographer, public scholar, father of three young explorers, and geographic educator, my connections to NCGE and the geographic education space have included the following: NCGE membership and conference participation; previously serving as Associate Editor of NCGE’s flagship journal: The Journal of Geography; previously serving as State Coordinator of the Georgia Geographic Alliance; and now serving as a 2022 National Geographic Explorer and founder of the nation’s first GeoBus located here in Florida.
I am an intentionally positive and always optimistic scholar committed to reimagining the future of geography specifically and science more broadly…a future that is more partnership-driven and more strongly connected across all segments of society. I am broadly trained in human geography with expertise in community-based scholarship, GIS, geographic education, service learning, and citizen science. In 2015, I founded an internationally recognized research and education group called Citizen Science GIS. The group’s goal is to connect scientists, educators, teachers, students, and society through the use of geospatial technologies to make science more accessible and responsive to community concerns. More specifically to geographic education, our Citizen Science GIS team has aimed to broaden participation in geography/science in three ways. 1) Our team developed, built, fundraised, and launched a bold new public-private partnership to support thousands of Florida K-12 teachers and students each year. In early 2022, we launched the nation’s first GeoBus™, a mobile STEAM education classroom/lab on a repurposed 40-foot city bus powered by the sun that provides geospatial technology learning experiences to K-12 youth, families, and teachers in Florida. Our mobile classroom/lab aims to broaden participation in STEAM through priority scheduling for Title 1 and similar high need school districts that have limited geography and geospatial technology learning opportunities. We’ve already served nearly 1500 participants through GeoBus since February. GeoBus was born out of our Maps, Apps and Drones Tour that supported school visits and community center visits to provide geospatial technology learning experiences for over 12,000 students, families, and teachers between 2017 and 2021. 2) Our team has supported seven years of NSF-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) and Teachers (RET) Sites where we have removed the financial barriers to international research, education,
and fieldwork experiences centered on community geography and GIS in Belize for over 75 participants with over 70 percent being from underrepresented groups in STEAM. 3) Our team supported an additional 2-year NSF RET Site to create fully funded learning experiences for multiple teachers and high school students in drones and GIS fieldwork looking at coastal ecosystems and seagrass changes in the US with the Smithsonian.
Our team’s work is all about partnership, creativity, and supporting the next generation in bold and imaginative ways. I would bring this mindset with me in this opportunity to support the future of geographic education specifically and science more broadly. I’ve always valued working with formal and informal educators, and folks of all ages from ages 4 to 94. To me (as a community geographer, father, and public scholar) geographic education is about cultivating an explorer mindset and celebrating that we are all educators in some manner, working together to chart new paths for the future of geography and science. Much like with our partners in the GeoBus mobile classroom/lab network we’re building, I hope we can work together to drive geographic education and science’s next generation.
