 Hi everyone. Thank you for inviting me to speak today. I'm going to talk a little bit about inclusive field education, some of the interesting and innovative programs that are out there, and then leave you all with a few summary points and food for thought for further discussion. So this first image here is of one of my favorite field work locations. It is Northern Arizona in the San Francisco volcanic field. It is some absolutely beautiful geology, but it is not very accessible. So a little bit of an outline. I'll talk about the need for inclusive field work, some of the little steps that you can do inside of your existing programs to make things more accessible for people with disabilities, and then some innovative approaches with examples of projects that have happened or are ongoing, and some closing thoughts. So in terms of the big picture, I thought I'd start by setting the stage by talking a little bit about disability in STEM. If you interview high school students about to graduate and go to college, roughly 20% of the students that say they would like to major in a STEM discipline also identify as having a disability. This is very good representation. In fact, it's slightly higher than the national average of the number of people with disabilities in the general population. So there's a strong interest in STEM fields for people with disabilities. However, as they move through the education system, you notice significant drop offs in their participation. By the time you get to surveying bachelor's degree recipients, only 10% of those with STEM degrees identifies having a disability. When you move to the master's degree level, only 6% of those graduates identify as having a disability. And when you get to the PhD level, only 2% of graduates with STEM degrees identify as having a disability. So there is a significant drop off from that initial strong interest in high school to actually exiting the other side and into the STEM workforce. So as I mentioned earlier, roughly 20% of U.S. college students identify as having some type of disability. However, science disciplines with a strong emphasis on learning in field and lab environments tend to have the lowest percentage of graduates who identify as disabled. For example, in my discipline, the geosciences, less than 5% of bachelor's recipients identify as having a disability. This is a significant underrepresentation of the disabled community. So the lack of accommodations and viable pathways for students with disabilities impacts the recruitment and retention of all other marginalized groups. This is a point I always bring up in my presentation because I feel it's really important. Disability cuts across all other identities. And when we exclude people with disabilities, we are excluding many other types of diversity from entering our classrooms and our field courses and our workforces. This picture here is of me and my friend, Jen Piotek. We are some of the few faculty members with disabilities who have managed to make it through that pipeline and into faculty positions. So before I get into a quick survey of some really interesting and innovative programs, I thought I'd talk quickly about some easy steps that everyone can take to make their field courses more accessible and inclusive. So I call these low investment, low effort. These are things that you don't really have to try very hard or change much about the systemic nature of exclusion in your program. So for one thing, you can evaluate your locations and try to select field locations that are more accessible physically to everyone. You know, you can think about why you're going on the field course and what you're hoping your students learn and take a look at why you're visiting the locations that you're visiting and see if there might be a more accessible option to learn that same concept. There almost always is a more accessible option. Many times we pick field locations because they're personally interesting to us or because of the adventure of say a five mile hike through the mountains, but that really doesn't have anything to do with the educational value of the field experience. Articulate a willingness to adapt your field courses ahead of time. So before a student approaches you, put it in your advertisement for your field course or your syllabus. Wherever you're talking about your field course ahead of time, make sure that you've clearly articulated your willingness to work with students with disabilities. Provide alternative ways of interacting with the landscape and the materials. If you do have students with disabilities who want to participate, there are ways to make the learning materials and the landscape more accessible. Easy things like tactile maps, raised figures, 3D prints, providing instructions in both audio and visual formats. All of these are very easy ways to include everyone in the field activities. I also strongly encourage people to move from an individual student model of learning in the field to one that focuses on collaboration. Collaboration can be a powerful method of breaking down barriers to participation. When you have a group working on something, there are more ideas. There's more flexibility and creativity. And generally it's a great approach for fostering a more inclusive atmosphere. And then the last thing I suggest is to just be flexible. Be flexible with how students are engaging with field activities and how they are contributing. Not everybody has to do everything in the field. For example, if you're taking your students to the beach to dig a trench and look at the stratigraphy, you don't have to have every student with a shovel for them to understand the concepts. So think about being a little more flexible in how students participate. All right, so let's talk about a few innovative approaches that are out there. One of the first ones I'd like to mention is a program at the Open University in the UK called Enabling Remote Activity. This was one of the first programs that really focused on bringing students with disabilities into required field courses. They took a technology-heavy approach. Well, I say took past tense. This is an ongoing program, but it's been going for more than 10 years now. And they were really instrumental in developing approaches to using technology as a way to bridge the access gap. Having students get as close as they can to the field site and then using telecommunications tools to bring them into the activities that were going on in the field. A program that built on the Engaging Remote Activity project and sort of expanded on it is the GeoPASS project that was NSF funded from 2016 to 2017. This was a project that focused on developing options for in-person learning for people with disabilities. So it used a variety of approaches from careful site selection, making sure that everybody could physically access all of the sites of interest. And then later in the program brought in tools from the ARA project, which I mentioned on the last slide, to bring in an additional layer of accessibility through technology. One of the things that we noticed as those projects really gained traction is that there were other departments that would, there were other departments that were very interested in using technology to bridge the access gap, but they didn't have the funds to buy all of that gear. So we put in a grant and the lift kit, the Library of Inclusive Field Technology was the result. This is a lending library of tools that other field course instructors can check out from us and make their courses more accessible if they have students with disabilities who'd like to participate. We also provide support on how to use the equipment in a way that best facilitates learning for everybody. In the last few years, the pandemic has created a huge interest and a massive leap forward in virtual fieldwork. So I'd be remiss if I didn't mention virtual fieldwork as a viable option. You know, virtual fieldwork can be everything from providing some photos and text to describe a field site to really advanced, really cutting edge approaches. One of my favorite that's come out in the last few years is a 3D immersive gaming platform that is a, it's an immersive virtual tour of a place called Whaleback Anticline. And the way this was built, they went out and did a drone survey and built a 3D model based on the drone images, put that into gaming software and built tools and navigation, navigation options into this 3D model. So you can basically explore this landscape just like you do in an advanced video game. You have tools for collecting data. You have the ability to walk, jump and even use a jet pack to navigate the field site and collect data digitally and build a map and a geologic interpretation of the area. So it just gives you an idea of some of the really impressive options that are out there. And this is in beta right now. So this is in a testing mode before they roll it out into a more formal format. Some programs attempt to merge multiple ideas together using techniques that facilitate in-person learning for people with disabilities and also fully virtual accommodation where people don't have to be anywhere close to the field site. They may be in another state or another country. One such program is the Geospace Project. This is, I'm the lead PI on this project, full disclosure. This is a planetary geology field course that is launching this summer. And the idea is to build a flexible, adaptable field course where students can participate either in person or completely virtually using technology to interact with the field site. So our virtual participants will be integral parts of the field team. They'll be helping us interpret data, come up with research questions. They'll be very closely tied to what we're doing in the field. They just will be operating from very far away. So we're using a model based on how NASA runs its operations and we've got some NASA employees on this project who are going to really help bring that planetary feel to our in-person or fully virtual field course. This is technologically and logistically a very challenging undertaking. So will this all work when we pull it all together? We will find out in a few months. So some closing thoughts. The lack of accessible field experiences is an insurmountable barrier for people with disabilities when field work is required for degree advancement, which makes it a really serious problem that needs to be addressed. We need more options for accessible field courses, but there are other ways of gaining valuable experience, lab work, internships, computer modeling. There are many other ways that geoscience is done and so that needs to be reflected in our coursework. We shouldn't be too narrowly focused on one type of geology or one way of interacting with a field site. And then if accessible field courses are not available in your department, then field work should not be required to graduate. That's it. If you do not have an accessible path to your degree, then you need to reevaluate your program and figure out how you're going to build accessibility into your degree. And then lastly, we focus an awful lot on students because of course, as educators, that's where our passions lie. But very often in these discussions about disability accommodation, we forget that there are faculty members and professionals out there that have disabilities as well. And we don't do a very good job of supporting them either. So in terms of innovative programs, I would love to see more emphasis put on supporting disabled faculty in their ideas to move our disciplines forward, to reinvent the way we do things and make our discipline more inclusive and accessible from a very personal lived experience perspective. And I think I'm going to stop there because hopefully there'll be plenty of time for conversation. And I look forward to your questions.