This past month the University of Louisiana at Lafayette announced that Associate Professor Dr. Heather Stone was selected for a fellowship from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. The fellowship also comes with a $76,000 award that Stone will use to fund her research.
Stone has spent much of her life pursuing stories and sharing knowledge with others. After graduation from the University of North Carolina in 1998 with a bachelor’s in journalism, Stone moved to New York where she worked for ten years in the technology industry.
But throughout that time, Stone figured she would pursue teaching. So in 2006 Stone received her teaching certification at Duke University. She then began teaching second grade and became a literacy reading specialist. During her time teaching, Stone went back to school, receiving a Master’s degree in educational leadership and a PhD in curriculum and instruction at Louisiana State University.
After researching education in other countries in her postdoctoral, in 2015 she joined UL Lafayette as an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development. It is there that she would be able to capitalize on both her experience in education and technology, researching the ways we can “pull tech into education” as she puts it.
Stone is finding ways to enhance K-12 education with new technologies such as virtual reality, in the hopes of immersing students in the subjects they’re usually just staring at on a page.
One such subject Stone has brought to life is her research regarding the Choctaw tribe of Isle de Jean Charles. After Hurricane Ida, the island was devastated by a direct hit. Since then, 98% of the island’s landmass has been lost and only four families remain on the island, making the rest of the Choctaw Louisiana’s first climate refugees.
Since the catastrophe, the Jean Charles Choctaw have been taking every opportunity to tell their story and have their voices heard. Since 2015, Stone has immersed in the community, collecting their oral history and their experience in losing their ancestral home.
Every year, Louisiana loses 25-30 square miles of land off its coast. Many Louisianans hear numbers like this all of the time but with her programming experience, Stone has been able to create an immersive virtual reality experience that lets people see what is happening to Isle de Jean Charles, and how much it has lost since Ida. She then brings virtual reality equipment to schools, allowing students to see the coastal erosion unfold before them.
“Some of the quotes I’ve got back [from students] were ‘I didn’t really understand erosion and what was happening to our coast until I saw it from the viewpoint of those who are really living it,’” said Stone.
Stone’s goal with this project and her career as a whole has been to “tell the stories that haven’t been told,” as she puts it. And with the NASEM fellowship, she will be able to improve and expand upon the Jean Charles project. The $76,000 award could allow her to have a graduate or undergraduate student help support her research. The award could also enable her to take more trips to Isle de Jean Charles, so that she can collect more of the Choctaw’s oral history and bring what is happening at the edge of our state directly into the classroom.