Educational and ethical dilemmas for STEM education in Pennsylvania’s marcellus shale gasfield communities

The Marcellus Shale natural gas extends a mile below the surface of two-thirds of mostly rural Pennsylvania, and extends north and south into parts of New York, West Virginia, Ohio, and Maryland. Long known to contain signifi cant amounts of natural gas, technological developments in the last ten years have made it economically feasible to commercially extract shale gas. By the mid-2000s the Marcellus Shale formation was widely recognized as the largest reserve of natural gas in the United States (Engelder, 2009), and by 2007 unconventional natural gas extraction 2 in Pennsylvania had begun in earnest. For many Pennsylvanians, making sense of these changes to their local circumstance has been diffi cult within the context of a politically charged and on-going debate about the environmental and social effects of unconventional natural gas development.