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Socio-ecological histories of places are political, contested, and intimately linked with ways of knowing and being in the world. Supporting students in perspective taking and reasoning through contested histories of places are equity practices that allow for multiple and diverse stories to be told, honored, and incorporated in science learning. In this paper, we describe an approach to teaching about socio ecological systems from the Learning in Places project using a framework called Socioecological Histories of Places. We first describe the framework and its design within the Learning in Places project. We then analyze one teacher’s implementation of this approach and discuss implications for understanding issues of power, historicity, and ethical decision-making in field-based science learning and teaching. 

Star formation in galaxies is regulated by turbulence, outflows, gas heating and cloud dispersal -- processes which depend sensitively on the properties of the interstellar medium (ISM) into which supernovae (SNe) explode. Unfortunately, direct measurements of ISM environments around SNe remain scarce, as SNe are rare and often distant. Here we demonstrate a new approach: mapping the ISM around the massive stars that are soon to explode. This provides a much larger census of explosion sites than possible with only SNe, and allows comparison with sensitive, high-resolution maps of the atomic and molecular gas from the Jansky VLA and ALMA. In the well-resolved Local Group spiral M33, we specifically observe the environments of red supergiants (RSGs, progenitors of Type II SNe), Wolf-Rayet stars (WRs, tracing stars >30 M⊙, and possibly future stripped-envelope SNe), and supernova remnants (SNRs, locations where SNe have exploded). We find that massive stars evolve not only in dense, molecular-dominated gas (with younger stars in denser gas), but also a substantial fraction (∼45\% of WRs; higher for RSGs) evolve in lower-density, atomic-gas-dominated, inter-cloud media. We show that these measurements are consistent with expectations from different stellar-age tracer maps, and can be useful for validating SN feedback models in numerical simulations of galaxies. Along with the discovery of a 20-pc diameter molecular gas cavity around a WR, these findings re-emphasize the importance of pre-SN/correlated-SN feedback evacuating the dense gas around massive stars before explosion, and the need for high-resolution (down to pc-scale) surveys of the multi-phase ISM in nearby galaxies.