Some more notes on talks, with quick paraphrases of titles that were written as the talk was starting, so they might not even be recognizable in some cases. One thing I noticed that happens here is that the session director announces the title of the talk as an intro, which I don't recall happening too often in other conferences, but maybe my memory is just faulty.
- Promoting Success w/o a Geoscience Program - just had 3 science students last year. "[We're] not preparing future geoscientists". She also noted that ~98% of community colleges do not have a geoscience program. A later speaker in session remarked that that doesn't sound right and that their college doesn't have a geoscience degree, but that they still consider themselves to have a program. I think that the original speaker is quite correct to say that not having a degree, and at a community college we're "only" talking about an associate's degree, means that you don't have a program. We have Earth and Planetary Sciences courses, and we even have an Earth and Planetary Science coordinator, but we can't say that we have a program.
- Comparison of two effective com. coll. science programs - comparing Arizon and Minnesota, with a speaker for each splitting the talk. What define's strength? Function of the Served Community / College Mission / Place in statewide higher education / number and interests of geoscience faculty / student enrollment and interest. I think that that was well worth enumerating, if you think of 'strong' programs, they're going to be hitting the mark on all of those, with the served community condition perhaps being met after meeting the other conditions, or springing up naturally out of having met those other conditions. So how to get students interested? Well they offer a "low stakes" field course. By that they mean that its only worth two credits. Which seems odd at first, why do all that work for only two credits, BUT the advantage is that it then doesn't carry as much weight in GPA calculation, it won't 'ruin' your GPA if you mess it up. Which, if the students realize that, is a pretty clever recruitment tool I think. They directed their program at Title 1 schools (apparently those that receive funds, or some level of funds or some such) for lunch programs, w/ Educational outreach programs using college student teachers as their teachers.
- Field Trips as a tool for recruitment/retainment - Exploration can attract people. Post trip, they students meet and are given strips of paper with observations and interpretations, and told to put them in order, based on what they saw during their exploration. Students also wirte a paper. They tried student (peer) review w/blackboard, but had troubles getting people to take that part seriously. I seem to recall at anoth meeting, at the Ocean Science Diversity Workshop in Seattle infact, that one of the speakers there was doing, something, I forget what right now, to make sure that people participated. I think that their own grade was modified in part by how much a paper that they had reviewed had been improved (so grade once by a prof, send for review, grade again, and modify the reviewers grade by some proportion, and they better hope it doesn't go down!). They've been running one trip a semester, but are now considering/starting to do two, three, etc. This was in northern Virginia.
- Field Experience - This is in California. At this com. coll. they offer lots of field courses, w/ some as a capstone type. Their intro courses have individual optional field courses associated with them, so you can take oceanography and also sign up for Oceanography field Trips, or physical geology, and physical geology field trips, etc. These were all 4 day trips, but that might be a one day trip, and then later a 3 day overnight trip, or 4 sep trips, etc. They're also having 2-3 hour field trips incorporated into the mainline course. They're doing sediment sampling and sorting analyses, mapping structures, using compasses, etc. The capstone courses are in the intersession and are 2-3 week courses. I recall the speaker saying that when she hears from profs. who receive their students after they transfer, that they are super duper prepared for their intro field courses. She was happy about that. But I am thinking, jesus, these kids are doing a heckuva lot of field work, for an associate level degree, and THEN they still have to take introductory field courses?
- Watershed Monitoring Program - Shoreline City, WA. Site has lots of erosion upstream with a wide depositional zone/floodplain downstream. Glacial till and sand with some clay beds. They monitor deposition/flooding events, which is easy for them because its on their campus, or super close or whatever and they can just stroll out to it. Students in 100, 200 level courses (2 courses) do the monitoring, to give the infor to the watershed authorities eventually and also for the college's own need to monitor their own impact on the watershed. They're going to start using GPS tech to measure out the main channel thalweg (had to think for a minute what that was, for some reason I was thinking of geode(c)t(ic)) position to measure change over time.
- Pedagogical Shift in Field Geology Courses - normally I hate it when people make their titles sound crazy impressive when they're not. But here they didn't mean that they've discovered some tremendous, Kuhn like paradigm shift in the way every teaches, but rather that they had shifted their own pedagogy after a while. They started with Cram and Jam type field courses, with students setting camp, then starting with lectures in camp, covering the basics of earth science, even bringing, ironically, rock sample kits to the camp, and then going out to the field. But this made people feel overwhelmed. The speaker related that it was to the point that one student called her husband and told him to book a flight home for her now cause she was gonna loose it. But the speaker said that by the end she ended up loving the course. Actually what he said at first but then corrected himself on was that by the end of the day she loved the course. I was thinking, if that were true, they this person'd be nuts to flip flop between such extremes. So their shift was to just let the students go out directly into the field on the first day, to explore on their own, just telling them to be observant. And they'd do this for like an hour or a few and come back and then they'd start going over what they saw, and gradually build up to c.f. the level you'd want in that introductory talk. They felt that this worked very well. These are students with, often, zero experience, and apparently it works better this way. They repeat the process at subsequent stops, with the students writting up their observations. Observe and Report. Then in the evenings, thats when they break out the kits and the lectures. The crazy thing is, these guys are running field trips outta WA, but to Montana, Arizona, Hawaii and the Galapagos. And again, thats with what, 1st, 2nd year students with no geo background.
- Earthquake Preparation and Preparedeness - Also a Shoreline Com. Coll. This is a Service Learning (SL) program; ties classroom to serving the community. They got an Americorps Vista volunteer Coordinator, this person determines the needs and interests of the community and coordinates with the program instructors. They also have a Fellowship Program for faculty to develop SL courses. They may even makde SL a graduation requirement. Speaker notes 2 models (1) a 15-hour commitment on thet part of students where they go out and find non-profits to work with. (2) project-model; centered around specific project outcome for the community group (ie watershed monitoring, hazards education, etc). The project they did was Earthquake preparedness to educate local community about hazards and increase preparedness, in groups of 3-4. So the students had to work within that framework. This is done in a quarter (so 6 weeks I think). Example activities, powerpoint presentation, posters, it depends on the needs of the non-profit org. At a YMCA afterschool program, they asked that it not be a lecture for the kids, so the students made a trivia game on hazard preparedness. Another did emergency plan revisions for retirement homes, child care centers, including their com. coll. campus' child care center. This fufils the college mission 'to serve' the community. So the project is of course just a part of the class,so the students are being taught, and they're basically being tested on their learning of the material by seeing how they can teach it or communicate it to the community.
- Earth Science or Geo-Science - the last talk was a general discussion on which it best, with earth science covering astro, geo, ocean, meteo. The speaker I think nwas in a position to be able to give such a general talk, imho, I beleive, because he had been brought on by a college to revamp their geoscience program, so he's speaking from a position of 'authority' in a sense.
And that was Monday morning. Got a quick breakfast at the starbucks in the convention center (of course there's one in the convention center). Pumpkin latte was better than I thought'd've been.
