Ryan Pemberton is a Science Education Specialist with the Asombro Institute for Science Education in Las Cruces, NM. Since moving to New Mexico and working for the Asombro Institute, he has been an integral part of developing several K-12 programs that focus on connecting what students learn in the classroom to the Chihuahua Desert that surrounds them and spreading the message of environmental education to students all over southern New Mexico. Asombro’s engaging place-based education programs annually serve over 22,000 students. Ryan hopes that participating in the ee360 Fellowship will give him the tools to be a more effective educator and leader in his community. This fellowship is a great opportunity to lend credibility to his voice at the local and regional education table while learning and developing with people who have similar ambitions. He decided to pursue a career in EE after spending a summer teaching kids about trees as a camp counselor for a nature center. Ryan has a Bachelor’s degree in Forestry and Wildlife Biology and a Master’s degree in Natural Resources from the University of Georgia. In his spare time, he likes to play Pokémon Go with friends, read, or spend time outdoors hiking or camping with his friends and dog.

About Ryan‘s ee360 Community Action Project

For this project, Ryan and the Asombro Institute are teaming up with LandPKS developers. LandPKS has designed a mobile app and training to help remote farmers and ranchers make sustainable land management decisions. Through the training LandPKS has done, they discovered a need for basic topography and soil science education at the K-12 level. Ryan will be working closely with them to design an education module that will teach basic soil science in conjunction with the mobile app and allow students to collect and use their own soil data and compare it to soils around the globe. After completion of pilot testing and implementation with several Las Cruces, New Mexico schools, the education module will live on the Asombro Institute and LandPKS websites available to educators all over the world for free download. For New Mexico students, it means more in-depth science lessons in a region where science has been heavily de-emphasized in favor of math and literacy; it will expose students to potential careers, and make them more knowledgeable on the issues surrounding land management and soil conservation. For LandPKS, this will broaden the scope of their reach by giving them more data to support informed decision-making and help train the future farmers, ranchers, and land managers of the world.