2023 Awardee - Heather Goss, AGU

Heather Goss has been awarded the 2023 James Shea Award by the National Association of Geoscience Teachers.

For decades Eos, the news magazine of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), served a valuable and largely internal purpose of sharing discoveries, opinions and opportunities to members of the world's largest professional and scientific society in the earth and space sciences. When Ms. Heather Goss assumed the role as Editor-in-Chief of Eos in 2019, she saw the potential of this publication to serve a much broader and public-facing role which could benefit not only the AGU membership, but also further the cause of earth science education and benefit the general public.

In her first year on the job, she and her staff fully transformed Eos into a colorful, engaging, informative and externally popular journalistic outlet for earth science news and information. Under her leadership, the Eos website won an EXCEL Award for Editorial Excellence every year from the Association Media & Publishing Network. In addition, seven feature articles won Gold and Silver awards. The consistently high quality and scope of these articles is testament to Ms. Goss' commitment to producing high-quality, in-depth reporting on a wide range of topics. Ms. Goss' recognition of geoscience education and geoscience education research as topics as worthy of feature news coverage in resonates for NAGT.

She has been an advocate for geoscience education within AGU's publications as well as the organization. One of the innovations that Ms. Goss led as editor of Eos was elevating the activity, purpose, and editorial impact of the volunteer Science Advisors, all drawn from experts in the sections of AGU.  While AGU and Eos have long valued geoscience education in general, Ms. Goss expanded the use of the Education science advisor to match the establishment and growth of that formal section within AGU, working to establish the Eos Education science advisor role also as an appointed member of the Education Section executive committee.  She capitalized on the field-specific insights of the Education science advisor to help review and further frame submitted ideas for feature stories and also to develop original topics that her reporters and writers could explore.

In 2020, she reached out to develop connections between Eos and Teach the Earth, which led to the development of Eos News: Geoscience and Global Events (ENGAGE), a resource designed for high school and undergraduate science teachers, now with a robust website (https://eos.org/engage) with links to Teach the Earth for activities. Her collaborative approach recognizes the strengths of NAGT and the Teach the Earth collection and builds on it by bringing us together with the wide-ranging news and journalism strengths of AGU and Eos. Through her transformative editorial work at Eos and her commitment to reaching a wide audience, Ms. Goss has indeed made "exceptional contributions to the editing of Earth science materials that are of interest to the general public and/or teachers of Earth science." We can't think of a better recipient of the 2023 Shea Award for Excellence in Earth Science Writing and Editing.