Mr. Jonathan Z. Boxerman Annenberg Hall Room 318 2120 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208-0001 Phone: (847) 467-3871 Fax: (847) 491-8999

  Biography

The Loma Prieta earthquake in October of 1989 was a defining moment in my life. After those 15 frightening but exhilarating seconds, I wanted to better understand the Earth. Shortly thereafter, I enrolled in a year-long earth sciences elective, taught by Mr. Peterson at Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California.

Tafoni, a class of cavernous weathering landforms.

 

 

Bean Hollow State Beach, in Pescadero, California is about 3 meters across.

Note the exquiste boxwork weathering in the center of this sandstone outcrop.
Photograph by Jon Boxerman.

I attended UC San Diego where I studied Earth Science at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. I received degrees in earth science and fine art (photography), working to understand the aesthetics and wonders of art and science. After graduation I worked for several years as a field geologist for an environmental engineering firm. I left private industry and went on to receive a MS in geoscience from San Francisco State University. The focus of my masters project centered on tafoni, a mysterious rock weathering phenomenon. While working toward my masters degree I co-taught sixth grade earth science for a couple of years at a San Francisco Unified School District middle school and was funded by a National Science Foundation partnership program called GK-12. Currently, I am studying Learning Sciences at Northwestern University and funded through the Center for Curriculum Materials in Science, a National Science Foundation funded Center for Learning and Teaching. I also am helping build a middle school earth science curriculum as part of the IQWST project (http://hice.org/iqwst/).The focus of my research is on how people understand earth systems science and changes to the earth over extreme spans of time and space.

Traveling, hiking, gardening, music, making collages, cooking, sports, reading, and photography are some of my favorite pastimes.

An artist collective

Some of my art

Tafoni

2008 - NSF CCMS Research Fellowship

2007 - NSF CCMS Research Fellowship

2006 - Northwestern University Fellowship

2006 - Distinguished Achievement Award for Academic Excellence

2005 - GK-12 Partnership Program NSF Fellowship

2004 - GK-12 Partnership Program NSF Fellowship

Year		Degree		Institution
2006		Applied Geosciences, M.S.		San Francisco State University
1999		Earth Sciences, B.S.		University of California, San Diego

My research interests focus on how people represent knowledge of earth systems science and earth processes that change over extreme spans of time. How people acquire knowledge about the natural world through everyday cultural interactions, how this knowledge intersects classroom based learning experiences, and how to design learning environments to support communication and learning of big ideas is science are three related research questions that pique my interests.