Chayanee Brooks, an HSTA award-winning educator, will take her students to new heights
Posted: October 15, 2025
Chayanee Brooks, an English teacher at Kaʻū High, has been named one of 12 educators nationwide to participate in the 2025-26 Embedded Teacher Program (ETP), a prestigious initiative offered by Space for Teachers.
Brooks (pictured left) also earned this year’s Pono Award from the Hawaiʻi State Teachers Association. She was selected for that honor because of her exceptional leadership and passion in bringing innovative, hands-on opportunities to her students.
As part of the Space for Teachers program, Brooks will fly aboard the nation’s only zero-gravity aircraft — the same platform used by NASA, universities, and aerospace companies for astronaut training and authentic microgravity research. During the flight, the specially-modified Boeing 727 will perform a series of 30 parabolas, each producing about 20 seconds of weightlessness, for a total of nearly 11 minutes.
Brooks will conduct a student-developed research project during her flight, connecting classroom learning with creativity and science in a real-world space environment. Her students will get to see their ideas come to life in a setting typically reserved for space scientists and engineers.
Over the course of the school year, Brooks will:
- Attend a microgravity workshop at the University of Texas at Austin Center for Space Research to learn how weightlessness can be connected to classroom learning.
- Work with her students to design a project that reflects their interests and builds on Brooks’ curriculum and local interests.
- Collaborate with mentors to prepare the project for flight, culminating in Brooks personally flying and testing it aboard the zero-gravity aircraft.
The program covers the cost of travel, lodging, and meals for the Austin workshop as well as the parabolic flight, which will take place in the spring or fall in 2026 in either Texas or Florida. The Hawaiʻi Space Grant Consortium is working with Space for Teachers to help cover Brooks’ travel expenses from Hawaiʻi to the flight campaign site.
“This recognition is not only a tremendous honor for Ms. Brooks, but also a meaningful opportunity for her school and district. Her participation will help students see how creativity, culture, and imagination can have a place in space-related learning,” said Laura Tomlin, chief executive officer of Space for Teachers.