Sarah Coppersmith
College of Education
Sarah A. Coppersmith, Ph.D., a team member with the College of Education Geospatial Design Lab, serves in multidisciplinary settings and is currently a doctoral dissertation research chair, and a Fellow in the UMSL Inquiry Circle Program on global competency. With degrees in geography, earth science education, and certification in historic preservation, she has been a classroom teacher, park ranger, and cartographer, teaching graduate research, education methods, and geography. Skills honed through the UMSL Center for Inquiry Science Teaching and Learning, along with strategic planning coursework and capacity building experience, led to securing grant funding and research for establishing a collaborative inquiry community-of-practice approach. Questions around transformative pro-social learning led to exploring ambiguity tolerance of undergraduates and teachers integrating inquiry, geospatial technology, spatial thinking, social justice, and primary sources in a Library of Congress K-16 geo-history learning project with community agency partners. Teaching and research also include GIS and dialogic inquiry, global competencies of teachers, linguistically and culturally responsive teaching/inquiry within K-5 language immersion, and undergraduates/professors’ beliefs and agency in World Regional Geography. Further, incorporating TESOL, supports for emergent bilinguals, delving into stress/self-efficacy via inquiry learning, and design thinking signifies an interest in the powerful intersection of inquiry, language, and science within a community of learners.