Teacher Feature: Carrie Jane Margeson

If you were to parachute into the classroom of Carrie Jane Margeson on any given school day, you might find her wearing a dress that is patterned after the earth science lesson she is teaching. It’s just one part of her effort to make STEM learning both accessible and fun for her students.

“You make the science puns, and then the students start to understand the puns, and then you just laugh with them,” Margeson said. “Because being a middle school student is hard. It's the worst, honestly. But if you can have a classroom where you do not feel pressured, you do not feel like you're going to screw up, you just go in and have fun—that’s an environment where learning and growth can begin to take root.”

Part of the mission of the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) is to inspire learning across generations. An important part of this effort includes inspiring STEM teachers. After all, it’s the teachers who do the day-to-day work to educate the leaders of the next generation.

Margeson teaches physical and earth science along with special education at Forsyth Central High School in Georgia. She is one of the nearly 400 teachers SURF worked with this year in professional development opportunities. Margeson spent a week at SURF for the annual summer workshop designed to help teachers connect with their peers and pick-up the latest STEM education strategies and pedagogy.

“The week at SURF was amazing. It was a reinvigoration of how much I love science and how much I love teaching science,” Margeson said. Teaching can be challenging; Margeson notes that even the most enthusiastic teachers, who are loved by students and their own peers, can reach a point of burnout over time.

“After a while you get kind of bogged down, doing the standards and the testing and all that. But the week at SURF, being outside while talking to like-minded science teachers, it was like a breath of fresh air that I can take back to the classroom. I'm really excited to take what I learned this week and combine it with whatI already knew, to make a better classroom for my students,” said Margeson.

This summer’s teacher professional development workshop at SURF included a focus on outdoor learning experiences, to help teachers inspire their students to better connect with the real-world around them. Margeson says as an earth science teacher, hands-on learning means getting dirty.

“With our science, it's so important for students to actually get their hands in the dirt. And I always try to encourage my kids to go get dirty. It's really good for you. There are learning opportunities you can’t get otherwise,” she said.

Margeson is empowered to witness students transform over the course of their time in her class. She says many start off being afraid or outright opposed to concepts in STEM—but with the right learning opportunities and strategies, this changes.

“By the end of the year, I love to see the kids arguing about science, subjects, science topics, or whatever we were learning about. It’s great when they are arguing about it at their table and arguing accurately. So, they start off a bit scared of the unknown and by the end they are not scared anymore. They can communicate with each other about it. That's fantastic,” she said.

In 2024, SURF’s education and outreach efforts reached more than 16,000 students with hands-on learning opportunities. The teachers, who take what they learned in professional development at SURF back to their own classrooms, extend this number even further.  This effort is an important part of the future of America’s Underground Lab. The current experiments at SURF will last multiple decades into the future, so the young people inspired in classrooms today could be the researchers, technicians, or engineers who advance world-class science at SURF tomorrow.

See a separate video with Carrie Jane Margeson here.