Learning Through Place: The Work of Elaine Westbrook

Dr. Elaine Westbrook is an Assistant Professor of Science Education at Montana State University Billings. Her work focuses on STEM education, informal learning, place-conscious pedagogy, and rural and Indigenous communities. I selected Westbrook because her work brings together areas I am interested in, particularly learning and technology, Indigenous knowledge, and place-based learning. Her work shows how technology can support learning without separating it from culture, community, and place, while strengthening relationships between different knowledge systems and creating opportunities for immersive, hands-on learning.

A key feature of Westbrook’s work is her application of place-conscious approaches in STEM education. According to her research, student interest in STEM grew through collaborative work, acquiring new knowledge, and conducting action research within a rural, place-based curriculum (Westbrook, 2022). Westbrook has since extended this research into immersive, community-based projects that actively braid Indigenous knowledge with Western science. The Northern Cheyenne Star Stories project builds on this approach by combining Indigenous and Western views of astronomy in an immersive learning experience grounded in the Two-Eyed Seeing framework, while supporting the preservation of the Northern Cheyenne language and culture (KTVQ, 2024).

Westbrook’s research aligns with new trends within educational technology, where digital and immersive tools offer fresh ways to learn. Her work shows that technology should do more than just deliver information. It can help students connect with culture, play, and different ways of thinking. She also co-authored research exploring how gaming can develop spatial skills and build pathways toward STEM learning through Minecraft (Hughes et al., 2020). She recently spoke at ISTELive 25: The Intersection of Indigenous Culture and Technology (EdTech Magazine, 2025) about combining Indigenous culture, technology, and makerspaces.

Westbrook’s work advances a view of learning as experiential, situated, and collaborative. It allows multiple knowledge systems to coexist without prioritizing one over the other. In this sense, technology becomes more than a content delivery mechanism: it connects learners to place, culture, community, language and different ways of understanding the world.

References

EdTech Magazine. (2025, July 3). ISTELive 25: The intersection of Indigenous culture and technology [Video]. https://edtechmagazine.com/k12/media/video/istelive-25-intersection-indigenous-culture-and-technology

Hughes, B. E., Willoughby, S. D., LaMeres, B. J., Frank, B., Westbrook, E. M., & Lux, N. (2020, June). Gaming spatial-skill development: Building STEM pathways with the use of the Minecraft gaming platform. 2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access. https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10252148

KTVQ News. (2024, March 23). MSUB hosts Northern Cheyenne language project’s ‘Star Stories’ with Stellar Insights. Q2 News. https://www.ktvq.com/news/local-news/msub-hosts-northern-cheyenne-language-projects-star-stories-with-stellar-insights

Westbrook, E. (2022). STEMulating interest with a rural place-conscious curriculum. Theory & Practice in Rural Education, 12(2), 197–220. https://doi.org/10.3776/tpre.2022.v12n2p197-220

 Generative AI Plan and Transparency

For this assignment, I planned to use generative AI tools minimally and for specific support functions. I intended to use ChatGPT to test my initial ideas against the assignment requirements, organize my scattered thoughts into a working outline, and identify areas to tighten my writing by reducing unnecessary length or redundancy. I intended to use Grammarly for final-stage editing to check grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence clarity. My guardrails were to keep the research, interpretation, and final writing my own, while critically examining and independently verifying any information generated by AI. I checked biographical details, institutional affiliations, publication claims, and any AI-provided sources and links against the original materials. In practice, I used relevant outline points as working material for my own research and writing, while disregarding unsolicited AI-generated sentences and paragraphs. I also assessed the responses for language that could oversimplify or flatten Indigenous knowledge into generic cultural references, and revised or disregarded those suggestions.

 Reflection

Using AI for this assignment was useful, especially for getting my ideas into a workable structure and seeing where I could tighten my writing. At the same time, I found myself repeatedly redirecting ChatGPT when it went beyond what I asked for, changed what I was trying to say, or offered generic language that didn’t fit. This was especially frustrating when working through an Indigenous lens, where the cultural context and specificity mattered to me. It reinforced how important it was for me to stay grounded in my own research, interpretation, and understanding rather than letting AI shape the work. Overall, I found AI useful as a support, but not as something I could hand the thinking over to.