Hearing the ocean. Standing in the sand. Looking at the hills. We witness all the beauty. We experience all the messiness. This is what our students need – science outside the four walls of the classroom. 

PARK TEACHERS at the Marin Headlands, a collaborative workshop between the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (NPS) and the Department of Secondary Education at San Francisco State University (SFSF) occurs at the perfect time for our candidates. We come together as they are entering the education profession. We want to help them imagine all the possibilities – to open the door wide for them – of what teaching excellence can be. They need and want to feel powerful in their teaching. The place-based Geology of PARK TEACHERS at the Marin Headlands helps them begin this journey. 
I also came to this remarkable education partnership at the perfect moment. In 2007, as a newly minted Assistant Professor of Science Education in the Department of Secondary Education at San Francisco State University, I was referencing my predecessor’s Science Curriculum and Instruction Syllabi as I planned – with both excitement and a bit of trepidation – for my first class and cohort of future science teachers.  I remembered that Dr. Kathleen O’Sullivan, long-time admired and recently retired, had specifically mentioned to me a relationship she had begun two years earlier with the National Park Service (NPS) in which she regularly took her cohort on a field session to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Kathleen and a cadre of NPS partners, including a geologist, education rangers, and education interns, led an investigation through a place-based curriculum linked to her Science Teaching Methods course.
I introduced myself to the NPS staff, and began my 12-year association with Roxi Farwell, the Education Manager of the Marin Headlands where the field session would occur. Steeped in inquiry learning and place-based pedagogy, Roxi proved to be collaborative, creative, knowledgeable, and just plain fun to work with as we prepared for our first field session. Joining us was Will Elder, an interpretive park ranger whose academic background included a PH.D. in geology, and whose knowledge of the local San Franciscan Complex runs deep. My 20 students received the gift of a memorable experience that beautiful late afternoon in October. The following fall of 2008, we shifted to the full-day Saturday workshop we have enjoyed together ever since.
I have had the great good fortune over the years to meet many times with Roxi as she considered the revisions of the Rocks on the Move curriculum that formed the basis for our teacher workshop. Her learning activities – Magic Windows on Rodeo Beach to illustrate geological time, Cookie Tectonics to demonstrate the crashing of plate boundaries, and the Rock Commercials to pitch the unique qualities of the San Franciscan Complex - imbued my candidates with the sense of Geologic Time being an active and vibrant process. Who of us can forget Geological Punning and I know that my students are totally willing to take on the “Mantle of the Next Generation of Earth Science Educators” (Gaurav, Education Intern, 2017).
These types of inquiry lessons in the field were prescient to the approaches now championed in the Next Generation of Science Standards (NGSS). The process of thinking like a scientist – argumentation, claims using evidence, collection and analysis of data, close observation of phenomena – all take place in the natural setting of the Marin Headlands. The critical applications of the NGSS for our candidates have included the opportunity to
•	Partner with practicing scientists and informal educators. The excellent NPS staff have designed lessons that offer context, content, and a look into how scientists work in the field.
•	Think 3-dimensionally in the field, employing cross cutting concepts, and see how it might transfer back into their classrooms into units aligned with the NGSS.
•	Participate with park educators as they model different styles of hands-on learning and scaffolding of lessons. 
Our graduates have taken these lessons into their own classrooms. Just over 240 candidates have participated in PARK TEACHERS since 2007. Our SFSU science credentialed teachers now make up over 50% of the science faculty of San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). (80% of our single subject graduates go on to teach in SFUSD schools.) Their middle and high school students want to understand how critical scientific issues personally affect them and their families. With workshops such as PARK TEACHERS our candidates gain the skills to guide their students to succeed in STEM and to believe in themselves as learners. We all want SFUSD students to say “I can see myself in STEM. I can go into the world and see myself as a scientist,” and to grasp that science is not just about memorization, but is also about inquiry and creativity.
The SFSU Teacher Education faculty is absolutely committed in working with SFUSD to bring issues in Social Justice to the forefront of science education, whether we are talking about climate change or geologic erosion in poor neighborhoods. Bringing our candidates out to the national park is one of the more powerful things we do in our Science Methods course because it helps them imagine ways to lower the barriers for their own students. Our current GCoE Dean, Cynthia Grutzik, understands programs such as PARK TEACHERS at the Marin Headlands are a stepping stone in addressing social issues through a scientific and environmental lens. Our teachers will be in classrooms with students who may not have visited natural areas just ten miles from their own communities. All the partners involved – SFSFU, SFUSD, NPS – share the value that access to natural areas is an issue of equity and inclusion.
PARK TEACHERS also has demonstrated a national impact. One of my original students, Analise Elliot-Heid (credential 2009), found her experience at the Headlands with Roxi to be so meaningful and relevant to her teaching practice that she interviewed Roxi for her own research as she completed her MA in Secondary Education. (Analise’s completed MA was recognized with the Graduate Achievement Award for the College of Education in 2010.) Since Analise completed her MA, she and I have co-facilitated summer workshops (2011-19) for future science teachers doing research at SLAC Stanford and SFSU’s Estuary and Ocean Science Center through the STEM Teachers as Researchers (STAR) program. 
Each summer, Analise and Roxi have arranged for our STAR cohort to engage in Rocks on the Move in the Marin Headlands. They, in turn, have requested to bring their students to the park to experience place-based learning that they now see as having a dynamic and active impact on the lives of their students. In Fall 2018, Kyla Bradylong (STAR EOS, 2012) who is now teaching biology at Maria Carrillo High School in Santa Rosa, brought her students to the Headlands for a deep dive into the local geology as she had experienced as a credential candidate herself.
I say to all faculty who share my love of getting students into the local environment – reach out and see which parks local to your university or school district support K-12 place-based learning and see how they can support you. 
This has been such an amazing collaboration and I have learned so much from Roxi, Will, Lynn and all the NPS staff and interns that I am grateful I have this opportunity to express my thanks and hope that I have been able to pay forward the gift I have received as a partner in this truly meaningful work. It has been so much fun and the highlight of my work as faculty at SFSU.

Thank you,

Larry Horvath Ph.D.
Associate Professor Secondary Education
Associate Director Center for Science and Math Education
San Francisco State University