24-4 Teaching Coastal Hazards through Story and Fieldwork: Tsunami Science as a Native Scientist

Session: Transforming Geoscience Education: Reimagining how we teach the Earth (Posters)

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Abstract:

Coastal Indigenous communities experience geoscience not as abstract concepts but as lived realities. Along the outer coast of Washington, the Quileute community is situated within a Cascadia subduction zone setting where earthquakes and tsunamis have shaped both cultural memory and modern emergency planning. However, mainstream geoscience education rarely incorporates Indigenous knowledge systems, place-based hazard experience, or culturally meaningful modes of learning. This gap limits how students engage with geoscience and reduces the relevance of hazard education for communities most affected by it.

In partnership with the Quileute Tribal School, NASA Riverways, and Graduate Students at the University of Washington, I developed and implemented a tsunami science curriculum that integrates field-based observation, local place names and stories, and foundational coastal geomorphology and hazard concepts. Teaching activities include observing the relationship between river morphology and wave energy, understanding tsunami evacuation through landscape navigation, and connecting oral histories to geologic processes. Storytelling, Indigenous scientific method, and reflective field journaling are used alongside Western tools such as topographic maps, GNSS, and tsunami simulations to help students interpret coastal change.

As a multiyear program, this project demonstrates how culturally sustaining and community-centered approaches can transform geoscience learning outcomes. Students asked more and deeper hazard-related questions during field components than in classroom-only settings, connected scientific concepts to personal and community context, and expressed increased interest in understanding earthquakes, landslides, and ocean processes. These outcomes align with evidence that place-based and identity-affirming STEM instruction increases engagement, retention, and perceived relevance, particularly for students from communities historically excluded from geoscience pathways.

By situating tsunami science in the context of Indigenous knowledge, lived experience, and local landscapes, this work expands how geoscience can be taught for both education and resilience. It highlights the importance of community partnership, cultural grounding, and field-based experiential learning in coastal hazard education. More broadly, it suggests that transforming geoscience education requires not only new instructional strategies, but also reimagining whose knowledge is centered, whose lands define the classroom, and whose futures geoscience serves and allowing Native scientists to build programs in academic institutions. 

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