In 2010, FSU joined the Earth System Science Education Alliance (ESSEA). This follows a period of over 20 years providing teacher inservice in broad areas of geoscience across the state of Florida and throughout the southeastern US. ESSEA modules provide a perfect opportunity to broaden our goals of reaching out to a sometimes poorly-prepared community of physical and Earth science teachers across the state and the Gulf region.

This presentation will focus on the prior development of NSF-sponsored courses at FSU for inservice and preservice teachers, and how they are being transformed by using the structured online framework that ESSEA provides, in an effort to engage participants in inquiry-based problem-based learning.

This transformation has been occurring in spite of substantial institutional upheavals; yet we manage to weather the storm. We will address how interdisciplinary teaching and research communities have been affected by such external forces, as well – do the bonds strengthen in such times, or weaken?