Title: Teaching Statistics Here and Now 

Abstract: We are at a pivotal moment for statistics education. The data science revolution has reinvigorated interest in statistical reasoning from a broad and willing audience. At the same time, statistics educators have found themselves teaching a student population which has spent the better part of two years in social isolation, potentially not having ever experienced the in-person college classroom. The intersection of these forces necessitates a style of teaching which emphasizes the immediacy of the present moment and local environment. I propose and discuss the idea of teaching “statistics here and now”— an approach which uses current events and our common university setting to contextualize statistics as a subject that is immediately relevant to students’ lives. Examples of this style include engaging with citizen science projects in the community, investigating claims of contradictory news headlines, and exploring survey data collected from students in the class themselves. I argue that this approach lowers entry barriers to our field, exposes students to more sides of the data science life cycle, and encourages students to evaluate evidence critically in an increasingly data-driven world.