Grace Bennett-Pierre, Individual, Family, and Community Education

Name:

Grace Bennett-Pierre

Title:

Assistant Professor

Department:

Individual, Family, and Community Education

Describe your research in about 200 words.

I study how environments shape the motivational and cognitive factors that contribute to learning throughout the lifespan. My goal for understanding these factors is to create informal and formal learning contexts that allow children and adults to access the knowledge they seek and empower them to solve problems. I am specifically interested in how caregivers and educators shape children’s and adults’ spatial thinking, challenge-seeking and self-efficacy, and how gender shapes these processes. In past work, I have investigated fiber arts as a context for practicing non-rigid spatial skills (e.g., thinking about bending, folding, and knotting), whether non-rigid spatial skills support Earth science learning, and how people learn climate science from NOAA’s Science On a Sphere®, a 6-foot spherical display installed in museums around the world.

What’s the most interesting thing you have learned from a student?

The most important thing I have learned from students is how joyful shared discovery can be! It is always inspiring to work with students because they bring their own unique perspectives and interests to bear on research projects and classroom learning.