WHY I TEACH: A STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

Donald M. Thieme, Ph.D

As a working scientist teaching young minds to think scientifically, I am very

fortunate to be entering my field at a time when scientific knowledge and computer

literacy are at a premium among university students, particularly in the United States and

other countries of the developed world. New knowledge and technology continually

expand the content which we deliver and the skills we impart in college science classes.

My early efforts at teaching have benefited from access to the latest instructional

technology and from fresh content acquired by attending scientific meetings and

reviewing new textbooks and instructional materials. I have made use of my own

research results to teach some topics, and I involve students in my research whenever that

is practical and beneficial to their education.

Even while flush with new scientific knowledge, I have always emphasized

certain fundamental principles of scientific method and critical thinking, which have deep

roots in human intellectual history and were introduced to me early in my own

undergraduate education. The deep intellectual roots of earth science methods seem

particularly significant to me now that I have acquired some experience with how my

students learn and sometimes fail to learn the content, skills, and values that I am trying

to teach. What I most want students to learn from my teaching is not the particular

knowledge tested on quizzes and exams but how to think more scientifically about the
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various problems and concerns they will encounter as more advanced students or as

citizens of the rapidly changing world that we all live in.

SCIENCE AND CRITICAL THINKING

While scientific research is by no means the only way in which people collect

information and form opinions about the world they inhabit, I do believe that our core

scientific principles and values are universal and form a basis for critical and rational

discussion. Recent texts listing values of critical thinking (Bassham et al., 2005; Moore

and Parker, 2007; Niewohner, 2006; Paul, 1993; Paul and Elder, 2000) are quite

comprehensive and encompass all that I had arrived at myself through perusal of many

philosophical systems, including some authored by thinkers from Asia, Africa, and other

areas not traditionally considered to be sources of "rational" thought (e.g. Hayward and

Varela, 1992; Wiredu, 1998; Zajonc, 2004). For teaching, integrity is perhaps the highest

priority. Students learn values and habits of thought by example, and to refuse to

entertain questions of value and human purpose merely inspires our students to do

likewise. With respect to environmental, medical, and other concerns that are particularly

close to the special interest of working scientists, refusing to pass judgment also leaves

those issues to be decided by those who lack current information or have narrow

perspectives (Stevenson, 1954).

Given that we cannot and ought not to avoid ethics and politics while teaching

science, my approach is to tolerate a wide diversity of opinion among my students while

encouraging them to empathize with those holding opposite positions. Empathy and fair-

mindedness are intellectual virtues that we cultivate in critical thinking (Paul, 1993; Paul
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and Elder, 2000) while at the same time we continually challenge superficial or hasty

answers in ethics and politics, just as we do in natural science. Nearly 100 years ago, this

virtue of humility intrinsic to the scientific method was remarked by the great American

pragmatist, John Dewey (1916, p. 189). We suspend judgment and subject our opinions

to rational discussion just as in the scientific method we subject our hypotheses to

experimental testing We do so having confidence that reason and logical argument are

universal skills and faculties, even though they may not in fact be equally distributed

among students in a class or citizens of a community or a nation.

Philosophically, I have always been comfortable addressing theoretical questions

or ethical and political topics in my science classes. It has taken me several years as a

temporary or part-time faculty member since obtaining my Ph.D to develop teaching

strategies that challenge students to think critically and express their opinions in logical

arguments. When teaching larger classes of 50 students or more, I prefer to use an

interactive format in which students are assigned to small discussion groups. Both group

discussion and writing assignments develop respect for reason as well as autonomy, a

virtue which is not always nurtured by science education as much as it is by liberal arts.

Rather than simply ask for a "term paper," I typically assign several shorter

writing assignments that require careful reading and logical argument for or against an

opinion or hypothesis. I do use computer-graded multiple choice tests to assess

foundational material, but I also include reasoning problems and essays in my

examinations. In my laboratory sections, I typically design or select exercises that

challenge students to apply concepts and write out their interpretation of a map feature,

bedrock structure, petrographic texture, and so forth. I grade the laboratory reports based
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upon logic and following procedure as much as getting the right answer. Foundational

material is valuable only if the students retain it for several semesters, and the sort of

short-term memory recall tested in multiple choice tests is not nearly as important for a

successful science career as is perserverance in the face of difficulties, obstacles, and

frustrations. For challenging students to persevere and show courage in their thinking, I

have had best results using take-home essay examinations or examinations taken in class

on essay topics assigned several days prior.

As was pointed out as early as the first decade of the 20th century (Mead, 1906),

modern colleges and universities encourage specialization rather than integration among

the sciences. Whether in terms of academic departments, courses offered, or topics

presented in an introductory course, we tend to introduce our students to science "through

one door at a time (Mead, 1906)." Students need and deserve a different approach, one

that exposes them to the big picture of scientific understanding, what Mead awkwardly

referred to as science's "complex interrelation with a mass of other things (Mead, 1906)."

Part of what I enjoy about teaching environmental geology or environmental science is

the opportunity to demonstrate practical applications in the community where students

live. Environmental problems also have ethical and political dimensions which challenge

students' critical thinking skills and attract many who would not otherwise take much

science (Busse et al., 2007).

FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS ABOUT EARTH SCIENCE

For geology or geography majors, it may not be as important to experience

Mead's "mass of other things" as it is to be taught, as Whitehead (1929) would have it, a
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few, important "main ideas" about earth science. These main ideas or underlying

principles that give science structure (Bruner, 1960, p. 31; Matthews, 2003) will be not

only the most important to remember but also the most useful to students in their future

education and careers. Personally, most of what I know and teach about in geology can

be boiled down to four fundamental ideas, all of which are related to some extent to ideas

which are also used in physics, chemistry, or biology. The most fundamental idea,

particularly for teaching earth science as an integrated field, is that of lithospheric plates

formed at midocean ridges and subducted in trenches (Cox and Hart, 1986). At least as

fundamental to doing geology today is the exponential decay of a radioactive isotope to

its daughter product(s) at a constant rate (Dickin, 1995; Faure, 1986). In fact, it took

dating the rates of seafloor spreading by decay of potassium to argon to actually prove

plate tectonic theory. Without isotopic dating methods, earth history would be based

upon relative rather than absolute dating and we would be teaching a very different

course in historical geology.

Two remaining fundamental ideas relate more specifically to my own areas of

research. One of these is the conservation of matter and energy, intimately related to

geomorphological principles such as Darcy's law for calculating groundwater discharge

(Fetter, 2001; Hubbert, 1969) or the "quasi-equilibrium" adjustment between channel

dimensions, gradient, discharge, and sediment supply in river channels (Knighton, 1998;

Schumm, 1977). The more advanced student will of course learn that the picture is not

really as simple as suggested in these classical models. In order to account for conditions

of pressurized flow, for example, we must supplement the simple mechanical calculations

of energy and force in fluids by using the Navier-Stokes equations which include terms
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for viscous forces acting inside a fluid (Allen, 1997). Mechanical models of physical

processes and balanced equations for chemical reactions are used throughout earth

science, serving as vehicles which carry forward the uniformitarian research project

begun by James Hutton, the father of geology (Dean, 1992; Grant, 1979; Hutton, 1795;

Playfair, 1822).

A final fundamental idea which plays a central role in both my teaching and my

research is that soils are "functions" determined by the state of five factors - climate,

organic matter, parent material, relief, and time (Birkeland, 1999; Jenny, 1941). Jenny's

state factor model is an early statement of many of the objectives which we continue to

pursue in soil "biogeochemical" studies. The challenge is always to hold as many factors

as we can constant while observing variations in one of the others, as is done for example

in soil "chronosequence," "toposequence," or "climosequence" studies (Birkeland, 1999).

While few of my current students have an opportunity to conduct such detailed studies,

I do cover the different soils found in Georgia and other parts of the world in sufficient

detail that they understand principles of classification and how profiles develop in

response to changes in each factor. Current field and laboratory methods applied to

modern soils, particularly the examination of soil thin sections under the microscope (soil

micromorphology), can also be used to study paleosols, soils that formed under

landscapes of the past (Retallack, 1990). Once again, the specialized research serves as a

vehicle advancing the general project of understanding the present as a key to the past

(Geike, 1905, p. 299; Hutton, 1795; Lyell, 1830).

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BOLD HYPOTHESES ABOUT THE EARTH

What most captures the popular imagination is not the slow, daily workings of

planet Earth, nor is that what typically prompts an undergraduate student to take their

first geology course. Bold hypotheses about cosmology, deep time, extraterrestrial life,

and mass extinctions are presented in nearly all earth science and environmental science

textbooks with only cursory mention of the detailed empirical studies that have

convinced leading scientists of their plausibility. It is the job of a college science teacher

not merely to titillate or entertain young minds with the sorts of outrageous hypotheses

that have proliferated since they were advocated so strongly by William Morris Davis

(1926). We must also try to provide enough detail so that students can determine for

themselves whether the scientific consensus in support of a hypothesis is based upon the

detailed "examination of the present state of things" advocated by Hutton (1795).

Learning to think critically becomes extremely important when considering the

evidence for and against such bold geological hypotheses as: a snowball Earth caused by

global glaciation during the Precambrian (Hoffman and Schrag, 2002; Hoffman et al.,

1998; Kirschvink, 1992), salinity crises and other sudden changes in the chemistry of the

oceans (Berner et al., 1983; Hs, 1983; Stanley, 2000; Stanley and Hardie, 1998, 1999),

mass extinction events - the demise of dinosaurs at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary and

the earlier Permo-Triassic event (Alvarez, 1997; Alvarez et al., 1980; Benton, 2003;

Erwin, 2006; Ward, 2000), meteorite impacts - the recently discovered Chesapeake Bay

crater of late Eocene age (Poag, 1999; Poag et al., 1994), the Ries crater of probable

Miocene age (Dennis, 1971; Horn, 1972; Shoemaker and Chao, 1961), and the Chixculub

crater identified as the cause for K/T mass extinction by Alvarez et al. (1980),
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supervolcano eruptions responsible for the Millbrig and Kinnekulle ashfalls of

Ordovician age (Bergstrm et al., 2004) as well as the Pleistocene ash from calderas in

Yellowstone and other locations throughout Mexico and the western United States

(Lowenstern et al., 2006; Sarna-Wojcicki and Davis, 1991), megafloods in the channeled

scabland of eastern Washington state (Baker, 1987; Bretz, 1923, 1928), global cooling

episodes such as the relatively recent Younger Dryas event approximately 11 thousand

years ago (Alley, 2000; Broecker et al., 1989; Peteet, 1995), or the rapid evolution of

Homo sapiens when the first hominids migrated out of Africa (Stringer, 2003; Tattersall,

1995; Cann et al., 1987).

Textbook explanations of the scientific method read like a simple recipe in a

cookbook and are not very helpful when we are actually trying to come up with a good

hypothesis or decide between several competing hypotheses for a single geological

feature or phenomenon. In his classic paper which should be read by every advanced

student of geology, Chamberlin (1890) admonishes earth scientists to entertain multiple

working hypotheses rather than rushing to favor a single "ruling hypothesis." Even when

we have considered multiple hypotheses and designed appropriate tests for each using

actual field observations or laboratory experiments, however, there is no guarantee that

we will accept a true hypothesis rather than claim to have successfully rejected it. The

great American geologist Grove Karl Gilbert was wrong at least once, for example.

Gilbert rejected the meteorite impact explanation for Arizona's Meteor Crater based upon

volume calculations and a magnetic survey (Gilbert, 1896; Schumm, 1991, p. 23). In

Gilbert's case, it may have been an overly stringent uniformitarian approach characteristic

of 19th and 20th century geology that biased him against accepting a correct hypothesis.
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I keep an open mind with respect to the role of rapid, even "catastrophic" events

in Earth history, encouraging my students to do likewise. I think that we remain true to

the spirit of Hutton and the other founding earth scientists as long as we use direct

observation to test the latest hypotheses whenever possible. Stratigraphy does provide us

with a record consisting primarily of gaps, fits, and starts rather than continuous

sedimentation governed by slow, gradual processes (Ager, 1973; Anders et al., 1987;

Sadler, 1981). Some role for extreme environments and rapid rates of change is

consistent with uniformitarianism as practiced by Hutton, who is otherwise well known

for describing angular unconformities that slice up the layered sedimentary and

metamorphic rocks of his native Scotland.

DIRECT OBSERVATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL PRAXIS

Geology shares with botany and zoology an ontogeny in that cluttered cabinet of

"natural history" which lives on in small regional museums and the collections of

amateur naturalists of every stripe. Like practitioners of these other "field sciences"

(Allen, 1978; Kohler, 2002), geologists give priority to direct observation and description

of nature's diversity. By contrast, these are not typical research priorities in physics or

chemistry and are dismissed as "merely intuitive" understanding in mathematical

research (Davis and Hersh, 1998, p. 391-399). Fieldtrips are essential for teaching

geology and, from a pedagogic perspective, they are a good opportunity to challenge

students with strong aptitudes for visual, tactile, and kinesthetic learning (Dunn, 1996;

Dunn and Dunn, 1993; Tate, 2006). Field experience does more than simply provide

examples of objects and concepts that are taught in lectures and labs, it makes concepts
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tangible and allows students to envision how objects are formed by fundamental earth

processes (Compton, 1985, p. 25-27; Frodeman, 2003, p. 95-115; Skinner et al., 2004, p.

5).

In presenting her list of fieldtrips that every geologist should take in their lifetime,

Rossbacher (1990, 2005) emphasizes the powerful influence of field experience on one's

success as a teacher of geology. Students find a teacher's firsthand experience inspiring,

particularly those students who may have less aptitude for purely verbal delivery of

foundational material. Fieldtrips do need to be structured so as to make an effective use

of time away from the classroom or from student work and study responsibilities outside

of class. Although I typically prepare a worksheet with questions about outcrops or

landscape elements that we observe in the field, I also like to ask some more open-ended

questions which challenge students to display critical thinking and creativity (Bartley,

2007; Busse et al., 2007; Padilla, 1991).

In teaching advanced classes, I build upon students' previous field experience and

I begin to make them aware of the limited visibility of the rock record in natural

outcrops, highway and railroad cuts, or quarries and mines (Nichols, 1999, p. 290-298;

Skinner et al., 2004, p. 5). Rocks that are not exposed at the Earth's surface can be

sampled through various methods of subsurface investigation, with drilling and deep

excavation giving us the most direct observations. Rarely is a complete core recovered by

drilling, however, and subsurface structural features and stratigraphic contacts are always

more difficult to reconstruct. To supplement fieldtrips, and particularly when it is not

possible to introduce students to drilling equipment first hand, I teach through

preparation of stratigraphic logs and fence diagrams, physical models made out of folded
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paper or modeling clay, or interactive computer graphics (Libarkin and Brick, 2002).

What is most important in the design of laboratory and homework exercises, I think, is

that students be rewarded for following procedures and keys correctly even if they do not

arrive at the correct answer or result. I also believe strongly in using real data wherever

possible and teaching procedures that are only slightly simplified from those which are

standard in current research.

When teaching hand sample identification, outcrop description, and basic field

mapping we always emphasize direct observation. In both industry and academic

research, however, geologists also observe rocks indirectly by means of various

geophysical instruments (Keys, 1990; Milsom, 2003). Whether the instrument is lowered

into a borehole, making contact with the land surface, or mounted on a remote platform

the result is the same. Properties are observed that are different from what can be sensed

directly, and many of the properties that would be recorded in outcrop can only be

inferred. In the case of a few methods such as seismic monitoring and ground-penetrating

radar, techniques have been developed to filter the geophysical data so that we can

actually obtain an image of subsurface features and stratigraphic contacts (Conyers,

2004; Milsom, 2003). We may not be able to determine the exact composition or detailed

properties of the rocks, however, unless we are able to "ground truth" the geophysical

results.

Geology actually makes use of many other methods of "indirect" observation that

most of us take for granted. We look at rocks through hand lenses or simple binocular

microscopes and then move up to petrographic and scanning electron microscopes. For

mineral identification we use x-ray diffractometers, and for chemical and isotope
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analyses we use various spectrometers. The scientific study of the Earth and Earth

materials is built upon direct observation but also ventures far beyond it. I think that it is

important for students to understand that technology continually gives us new

experiences, "new" not only the sense of more (quantity) but in the sense of "different"

and more diverse (quality). For example, there is the exciting venture known as

"planetary geology," in which robotic platforms were recently sent to Mars equipped with

sophisticated versions of several instruments that geologists commonly employ in the

study of the Earth and Earth materials (Squyres et al., 2003).

As a field science, geology demands a combination of theory and practice which

some philosophers and social scientists have referred to as "praxis" (Habermas, 1973).

The theory includes "first principles" of physics and chemistry, but our hypotheses

always refer to specific Earth materials and events in Earth history. We sometimes test

those hypotheses under controlled conditions, such as the flumes used to model natural

rivers. More often than not, however, we work by comparing objects and events with one

another and with their surrounding environment. We use the physics and chemistry to

explain the state of an object or to gauge the rate for a sequence of events. Following the

direction set for geochemistry by Forbes (1868) back in the 19th century, the chemistry

and physics are most valuable when they give an explanation or an insight into a

geological problem experienced in the field (Brock, 1978).

In addition to fieldtrips, stratigraphy projects, and remote sensing exercises, Earth

science educational praxis is greatly advanced by experiments with simple devices such

as stream tables (Lillquist and Kinner, 2002), groundwater simulators (Gates et al., 1996;

Trop et al., 2000), and seismic shaking models (FEMA and AGU, 1994). Students see
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that scientific knowledge can be used to diagnose and sometimes to solve environmental

problems. Environmental science and environmental geology classes are currently

popular with students, emphasizing the "practice" aspect of the praxis paradigm (Fawcett

et al., 2002). I think of praxis as a general approach or philosophy, applicable to teaching

physical geology, stratigraphy, or geomorphology as well as environmental and

hydrogeology courses.

TEACHING AND LEARNING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

The practice of education has been evolving at a rapid rate in recent decades,

thanks to our increasing use of electronic devices for communicating and for storing and

processing information. In terms of teaching philosophy, our goals in education remain

more constant than do our means of achieving those goals. Nonetheless, our concept of

what it means to be an educated person today certainly does involve familiarity with

computers and other technology which we all now use to read, write, calculate, and

visualize. This would not have been true fifty years ago, when film and television media

were already spreading throughout the civilized world but were primarily used for

entertainment, advertising, and politics.

Much teaching is actually done today through computers on the internet, as

"distance learning" (Keegan, 1990). Even for those of us who still deliver lectures to

students in a classroom, however, computers are commonly available to project textual

and visual material during our lectures. Students also commonly bring computers,

programmable calculators, cellphones, and other digital devices to class, some of which

they even purchase specifically for college. I have been using Microsoft Powerpoint to
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prepare and deliver lectures since I started teaching geology at Georgia Perimeter College

in the fall of 2002, and I used technology when presenting talks at meetings prior to that

beginning in 1996. For me, this has been a trial and error process with many of my

lectures now having been developed to a stage where I only make a few changes each

semester. I use the distance learning program VistaWebCT as well, providing my

students with syllabi, course schedules, grades, and all of my lectures through the internet

as either Microsoft Powerpoint or Adobe PDF files. My familiarity, experience, and

investment in educational technology is fairly typical for a junior faculty member today, I

think.

Faculty and students do vary with respect to the use of technology for learning,

particularly with respect to their use of visual materials. Geologists often opine that ours

is a "visual" science in that maps, cross-sections, photographs, photomicrographs, and

data plots are used to explain our methods as well as to illustrate key concepts (Rudwick,

1976). The power of a strong visual presentation has long been recognized in other

scientific fields as well, although many teachers and publishers for elementary and

secondary school students question the need for visual materials. One survey of studies of

children learning to read found, for example, that "pictures used as adjunct aids to the

printed text, do not facilitate comprehension (Samuels, 1970)."

Whether in print or in a Powerpoint lecture, the design of visual materials and of

the text or speech that they accompany contributes significantly to their effectiveness. As

Peeck (1994) concluded in her study of 45 college students at Utrecht University, very

little of the instructional potential of illustrations is generally realized in daily educational

practice. Drawing upon psychological theories of visual and multimedia learning (Clark

and Paivio, 1991; Kulhavy et al., 1985; Leavitt, 2007; Mayer, 2005; Schnotz et al., 1994),

I select, create, and utilize my visual materials with the goal of enabling my students to

construct a mental model or "schema" of whatever concept or procedure I am trying to

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teach. This approach to visual learning is one to which I was first introduced by the

authors and editors of the Wiley "Visualizing" series, for whom I served on several

faculty focus groups. During the fall of 2006, some students in my Physical Geology

(GEOL 1121) class at Georgia Perimeter College also read and submitted online reviews

of the Visualizing Geology textbook (Murck et al., 2008).

Emphasizing the effective use of "virtual memory" (Baddeley, 1992) while

minimizing "cognitive load" (Chandler and Sweller, 1999), Wiley "Visualizing"

consultant Matthew Leavitt has made the cognitive theory of Mayer (2005) accessible to

the series editors, textbook authors, and teachers who are making use of the rich library

of photographs, maps, and digital videos of the National Geographic Society. The general

approach is to combine speech, written text, static images, and video in an integrated

manner, drawing upon a student's prior knowledge to engage their mind and help them to

build strong mental models.

Figure 1: Cognitive Theory of Mayer (2005)

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The figure from Mayer (2005) on the previous page represents the intended

integration, which will of course be achieved differently when delivering a spoken

lecture as opposed to a written handout, textbook, or research paper. As teachers, we can

minimize extraneous cognitive load by choosing textbooks and teaching materials which

contain precisely those concepts and examples which we plan to emphasize in our own

lectures. In spite of the contributions which the Wiley "Visualizing" series has made to

my own teaching philosophy, therefore, I maintain relationships with other publishers

and continue to use several other textbooks, particularly for my advanced courses on

geomorphology or stratigraphy. Computer programs can also be extremely useful both

for teaching and for familiarizing students with methods and procedures they will need to

use in professional scientific research. When choosing software to use in teaching, some

important considerations which I keep in mind are:

(1) How much time must I myself and my students spend learning the program

before it starts delivering the promised content (i.e. Does the program contain

"extraneous cognitive load."

(2) How much does it cost?

(3) Are other colleges and universities using the software?

(4) Is the software used by government and/or private industry?

Few computer programs would receive a strong positive score in all of the above

areas. Geographical information systems such as ArcGIS (ESRI, 2006), for example,

require considerable time investment on the part of the user before they begin to provide
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independent educational rewards. Nonetheless, ArcGIS and the other ESRI products are

widely used by both government and private industry. Students recognize the career

opportunities afforded by GIS training, and many faculty themselves obtain grants from

ESRI for research projects that involve their students and enable them to apply newfound

geographical knowledge (Sanders et al., 2001). I have personally used ArcGIS in my

consulting for archaeologists, and I plan to do so for future research projects in which my

students are involved.

There are several other computer programs which are "industry standards" for

professional geologists. AQTESOLVE (Hydrosolve, 2007), a program for

hydrogeological modeling of groundwater aquifers, is now distributed with a leading

hydrogeology textbook (Fetter, 2001). For making most of the ternary plots used by

igneous petrologists, there is IgPet (Carr, 2005); and for creating x-ray diffraction

patterns similar to those that result from scanning slides prepared with specific clay

minerals or with mixed-layered samples there is NEWMOD (Reynolds and Reynolds,

2005). I would not introduce students to any of these programs until after they had

already mastered certain of the calculations and graphing techniques so that they can

verify and interpret the program output using their own data.

In many cases, computers do enable us to save time in making calculations,

perform operations consistently on large data sets, and check student work before

proceeding to present or publish research results. Plotting strike and dip measurements

and other structural data on a lower hemisphere projection is particularly time-consuming

and difficult for many students to perform consistently. Computer programs such as

Stereonet (Almendinger, 2003) are consequently indispensable for structural geologists

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and geophysicists dealing with orientation data, and such stereoplot programs can also be

helpful to advanced geology students conducting their own research projects. Although

typically beyond the budget of college geology departments, Rockware (2006) provides

an entire RockworksTM suite of programs which organize well logs and field descriptions,

correlate stratigraphic columns, balance sections, and even perform "backstripping"

based upon structural evidence for compression, folding, and faulting. WinFence

(GAEA, 2007) is a more affordable program for accomplishing many of the same tasks.

WinFence also takes up less server memory and is easier for students to learn than the

equivalent programs in the RockWorksTM suite.

Structural geology is one of the more challenging subjects to teach college

students, and visual learning materials such as computer animations are often helpful in

showing the structure of objects and their relationships to other objects (e.g. Dwyer,

1994, p. 384). I currently use short Macromedia Flash animations embedded within my

Powerpoint presentations. There are also programs such as Geo3D (Kali and Orion

1996; Kali et al., 1997) which have been specifically designed by geologists

collaborating with software designers to teach students structure concepts. While it is

intended for high school or even middle school students in Israel, Geo3D progresses from

simple cross-sections of anticlines and synclines to complex folds offset by normal

faulting on the Menasheh Plateau and the Judean Mountains.

Most of us who were educated prior to the widespread availability of computers

and other electronic devices in classrooms, dorms, and home offices tend to regard

graphics, videos, and computer animations as "aids" to use in teaching concepts that can

be independently articulated in written or spoken language. Several more ambitious

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thinkers have instead proposed that we aspire to a uniquely "visual literacy" (Debes,

1969; Seels, 1994), an ability to communicate with images and perform various uniquely

visual scientific tasks. To some extent, this is already taking place in specific fields. An

early example would be the use of flight simulators to train pilots, and graphic work

stations and computer images are now widely used for remote sensing and advanced

microscopy. "Virtual reality" models which enable students to rotate geological maps and

view them from any direction are currently being actively developed by Stephen

Reynolds of Arizona State University. Virtual reality experiences enable a student to see

how geology relates to topography, cities, and other features on the land surface

(Reynolds, 2007), possibly extending their knowledge above and beyond what can be

taught through written or spoken language.

Student (and faculty) enchantment with the power of visual presentation, visual

experience, and perhaps even visual "language" must not be allowed to take the place of

thorough education in science fundamentals. As was recognized more than a decade ago

in national surveys (Paulos, 1988; Snyder, 1990), many students beginning college

education today in the United States lack the basic numerical literacy that they need to be

able to grasp Earth science concepts without a certain amount of remedial instruction. I

begin with units of measure, using examples of both very large and very small objects

and introducing our geological "deep time" perspective on the Earth and the universe as a

whole. As we move on to study rocks and minerals, alert students are sometimes able to

recall the angstrom () unit when I discuss the radii of the cations and anions in common

molecules. A select few may even remember which way to move the decimal place in
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scaling down from the angstrom to the currently popular nanometer of the "nanoscience"

world.

Geologists share with chemists and atomic physicists an interest in the very small

objects which are the building blocks of matter, but we also share with astronomers a

cozy familiarity with large numbers. Although Carl Sagan may never have uttered the

words "billions and billions" on his television program Cosmos, he did introduce us to a

vast universe populated with around 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion (1022)

stars (Sagan, 1997). Large numbers can be used for time as well as space, and there at

least 4.6 billion (4.6 x 109) years between today's events and the events which created the

Earth and other solid planetary bodies in our solar system (Dalrymple, 2004). Using the

Systeme Internationale (SI) unit for time, we humans all live around two billion seconds

(deGrasse Tyson, 2000; Taylor, 1995).

Puzzles about measurement and unit conversions not only entertain the easily

bored undergraduate, they demonstrate the common numerical basis of all scientific

inquiry and the importance of numerical literacy for processing information in a modern

scientific culture. Many of our descriptive terms in scientific fields are essentially

shorthand for the values of fundamental dimensions such as mass (M), length (L), and

time (T). In geology, for example, an intrusive igneous rock body which has an area

greater than 100 km2 (L2) is referred to as a "batholith" while a smaller intrusion would

be a stock.. Stone Mountain, familiar to all students in the Atlanta suburbs where I

currently teach, qualifies as a stock but not a batholith.

Some memorization of constants and unit conversions is necessary for geology as

for most scientific fields, but numerical literacy is really a matter of feeling comfortable
 21

with numbers and knowing how to enter them and interpret them correctly as values for

variables in equations (Bridgman, 1922). Most students have heard of a light year, for

example, but few are able to explain how the constant speed of light, 186,000 miles per

second (L/T), makes it possible to calculate a constant distance, about 6 trillion miles,

which light travels in one year (Moseley, 2001). I find that students with severe "math

anxiety" sometimes benefit from solving problems with other students in small

discussion groups. I also take advantage of students' familiarity and interest in using both

computer spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel and programmable calculators

to develop numerical literacy and quantitative skills that are crucial for more advanced

college work in geology and other scientific fields.

For non-traditional students who are not as familiar with digital technology, there

are good reference works on Excel (e.g. Conmy et al., 2006) in addition to Microsoft's

online help. Many colleges and universities also now introduce students to Excel in a

one credit hour course on computer concepts or "digital literacy." I have developed

several exercises myself which emphasize sorting columns of data, calculating with

simple formulas, and producing x-y scatter plot graphs. One such exercise is a simple

calculation of the linear increase in lithostatic pressure with depth in the Earth's crust. An

interesting application of the "balance sheet" design of Excel is to have students work as

a group to develop a quantitative model of all the reservoirs in the hydrological cycle

(Rose, 1997). In the Historical Geology laboratory course at Georgia Perimeter College

(GPC), we teach grain size analysis using an exercise in which the mean grain size,

sorting, skewness, and kurtosis are all calculated in an Excel spreadsheet by the students

themselves (Anderson, 2005). In my Environmental Science class at GPC, I have taught

 22

descriptive statistics for several years now using data on water chemistry from wells in

both the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain of Georgia, much of it obtained from U.S.G.S.

websites. I also encourage students to use Excel to complete the flood frequency

analysis I assign of 30 years of record from the Conestoga River at Lancaster,

Pennsylvania.

My choice to use Microsoft Excel to teach quantitative methods is consistent

with my teaching philosophy, in that it makes use of a tool with which many of my

students are already familiar and will continue to use when they are no longer my

students. Errors have been found in some of the Excel formulas for statistical functions

(Burns, 2006; Goldwater, 2007; Simonoff, 2006), and spreadsheet calculations should be

checked carefully before using the results in academic research. Furthermore, some

quantitative methods which are fundamental to geology are not easily adapted to either

spreadsheets or programmable calculators. I have students plot chemical data on basalt

compositions in an AFM ternary plot, for example. They can use Excel to calculate the

"A," "F," and "M" percents of total oxides, but they really need to plot the data by hand

to understand how a ternary plot works. For more advanced students than I currently

teach, the program IgPet (Carr, 2005) does an excellent job with ternary plots. Concepts

of exponential growth (population) and decay (radioactive isotopes) are also difficult to

simplify for Excel or calculator exercises. I do find that the students who have had

calculus are often able to solve very advanced problems on calculators, but I plan to

develop a complete tutorial on exponents with examples drawn from the subjects which I

teach.
 23

At most colleges and universities, we are typically provided with computer

operating systems and basic software for text, data, and graphics from Microsoft and

Apple. If we are fortunate, we may also be able to obtain dedicated software for

teaching Earth Science or conducting geological research. For teaching students how to

do geology and environmental science using computers and calculators with which most

of them are already familiar, I have been very impressed with the software and exercises

available from both Texas Instruments and Vernier, a company which makes sensors

for field and laboratory measurement. The Vernier sensors output data directly to a TI

calculator or a laptop computer, and both Texas Instruments and Vernier are also

supporting their hardware and software with excellent webpages where students and

teachers can share their data and interpretations of results from both field studies and

laboratory experiments.

Although sharing data and interpretations are an important and exciting part of

scientific research, students also need to be made aware of the difference between sound

research use of other scientists' results and plagiarism. As defined for an instructional

setting by the Council of Writing Program Adminstrators (2003), plagiarism occurs

"when a writer deliberately uses someone else's language, ideas, or other original (not

common-knowledge) material without acknowledging its source." The two important

steps for both students and faculty to take in guarding against plagiarism are thus:

(1) Determine whether the material to be used in your paper or presentation is

common-knowledge within your discipline or is an original idea, wording,

illustration, etc... of the author or source that you are reading.

 24

(2) Acknowledge your source using a citation with a consistent and accepted

style whenever you think that it might not be common knowledge within your

discipline.

A "digital" solution to the problem of plagiarism, Turnitin, is widely used now in

freshman composition classes and as a method of checking student papers in any

discipline for plagiarized material. Turnitin is completely web-based, and the students

submit their papers directly to the program on the internet. Turnitin can actually collect

the student papers electronically, edit them online by inserting electronic comments into

the document, and return them electronically to students. I have tried Turnitin out a

couple of times, but I am still working out a complete strategy for preventing plagiarism

as part of my overall instruction in scientific writing. For courses in which I only assign

one final term paper, I typically do not fail a student based purely upon plagiarism but

instead require a complete rewrite that shows little or no plagiarism. Papers that misuse a

citation style, incorrectly use quotation marks, or fail to include some copied material

within their citations are graded down with a warning. These are not actually considered

to be plagiarism according to the Council of Writing Program Adminstrators (2003). In

an ideal academic setting, I would assign a series of short writing assignments in which I

would expect to see progressive improvement in terms of originality or require a series of

drafts if I assign a longer term paper.

Parallel and equally serious problems arise in our digital age regarding the use of

visual materials such as maps, dataplots, photographs, and video clips. Draft guidelines

for image digitization prepared for the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), for example,
 25

suggest that a "secure electronic network" should always be used to display and provide

access to digital images (Lehman, 1996). While it may not be exactly what is intended in

these guidelines, a distance learning program such as Blackboard or Vista WebCT is

secure in the sense that students must log in to the web server using their identification

number and password.

Many faculty, myself included, feel that it is actually our job to supplement the

image banks provided by textbook publishers with our own visual materials. In my case,

many of my materials are my own creative products while others are from published

literature and the digital archives of other scientists. I do acknowledge the sources for

most images, although my primary objective is to deliver educational content to my

students rather than to report on specific scientific findings. With respect to the possible

copyright issues, the Society for American Archivists (1997) has actually questioned the

need to restrict display to a secure network if the purpose is educational.

Structured internet platforms such as Blackboard or Vista WebCT enable the

best and the worst of the "distance learning" phenomenon. As documented by Keegan

(1990) and others (Maglogiannis and Karpouzis, 2007; Zapalska and Brozik, 2007),

distance learning has come about as a result of several social, economic, and educational

trends, not all of which are positive from the standpoint of science education. While

separation of teacher and learner is never of much benefit to the learner, in reality this

occurs throughout higher education given the commitment by most faculty to both

teaching and research. In my limited experience in distance education, I have endeavored

to maintain discussion, teamwork, and continuous communication with my students

using the structured platform just as I have in the past through informal emails and office-
 26

hour sessions. Indeed, these platforms make it quite convenient to set up workgroups and

use peer interactions as well as textual and visual materials to reinforce the knowledge

students have acquired, motivating them to learn new things together and experience the

world more fully.

Students do vary with respect to aptitude and preferences as well as preparation

for college-level science instruction. One tool which I have used in the past to help

identify student preferences for particular teaching approaches is the VARK (Visual,

Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinesthetic) questionaire developed at Lincoln University

(Fleming, 1995; Fleming and Baume, 2006). The questionaire is short (13 questions) and

seems to provide information useful to both student and teacher. As mentioned above, a

preference for visual learning and strong visual abilities can be extremely helpful in

studying Earth science. Testing students who have trouble with maps and other spatial

representations, Ishikawa and Kastens (2005) found a strong contrast between those with

high verbal (R) and low spatial (V) preferences versus those with low verbal (R) and high

spatial (V) preferences. There also may be an association with gender, since Vandenberg

and Kuse (1978) report that women tend to have lower abilities and preferences for

spatial or visual learning. These findings are preliminary, and more research on visual

tasks specific to Earth science is needed. Results using the GEOSAT test of student

ability to comprehend geological structures developed by Kali and Orion (1996) could be

directly cross-tabulated against VARK questionaire results, for example. As a cautionary

aside, it must be mentioned that Clark and Feldon (2005) found little if any evidence to

support the belief that learning is improved when instruction is specifically designed to

accomodate the sort of preferences elicited using the VARK questionaire.

 27

The range of aptitudes and preferences for individuals in the traditional "college

age" population is determined by random genetic variation as well as perhaps by gender.

In addition to this more or less random variation, there are some population-specific

changes that are occurring as "non-traditional" students are coming to make up more and

more of the student body on campus and in distance learning enrollment (Cross, 1981;

Knowles, 1970). Aging does diminish certain sensory-motor abilities (eyesight, hearing,

reaction time, etc.) but intelligence abilities (decision-making skills, reasoning,

vocabulary, etc.) tend to improve. My own experience is consistent with Cross's

observation that adult learners prefer a teacher with relevant job experience in the subject

being taught who is well organized and yet sensitive to the learning goals of individual

students. I think that the "andragogy" concept of Knowles (1970) is a bit overstated,

however, in that we are generally teaching mixed classes which sometimes even include

high school "joint enrollment" students as well as adult learners and the traditional

college-age group. I have taught more than one generation of the same family, for

example. Unless one is teaching at a senior center or advising an elder hostel group, the

abilities and preferences of the adult learners do not seem so radically different as to

overshadow individual and cultural differences.

Cultural differences are rarely mentioned in the science education literature,

although it has been observed by Kawachi et al. (2005) that Asian students generally

expect teachers to command attention and exert authority. I have noticed lower grades on

essays compared to multiple choice tests among some students from Asian countries, but

it is hard to determine how much is due to their intellectual traditions and upbringing and

how much simply to language difficulties. I know that the understanding of sensory
 28

perception among Buddhists and some other Asian religious traditions is quite different

from that of the empiricist philosophers who contributed so much to our basic scientific

approach in the English-speaking world. As the Dalai Lama has explained so clearly

(Hayward and Varela, 1992, p. 47), contemplative or "yogic" direct perception provides

theoretical insight rather than simple sense data.

I sometimes use specific case studies and field examples to attract the interest of

particular cultural subgroups within a class of students. Furman and Merritt (2000) went

so far as to specifically design one course to attract students from a particular ethnic

background who might not otherwise take an Earth science course. They teach a course

on African climate in which the enrollment averages 45 percent African-American, of

whom over 75 percent are female. Such a proactive approach to course development

should hopefully help to reverse both the gender bias and ethnic bias of private and

public sector employment in Earth science. A course on Latin America with a strong

Earth science component might also be well received at many public universities.

The teaching and learning environment in which we find ourselves today is very

different from that in which our fundamental principles of scientific method and critical

thinking were first developed. Nonetheless, I do believe that those same principles and

values apply in our current digital age, when our classroom may not have four walls and

there may be considerable distance between teacher and student. The design of even the

introductory Earth science courses has changed, but we still have quite similar learning

outcomes in terms of both science fundamentals and a grasp of general concepts. Both

student and teacher are ultimately assessed based upon how well students achieve those
 29

outcomes, whether the assessment is in a traditional "blue book" examination or

administered in a testing center on a computer.

While challenging, proactive use of educational technology and curriculum

design manifests our integrity as we make the systems approach to teaching Earth science

work. Our own new experiences as teachers in the digital age will ultimately provide

richer experiences of the Earth for our students. Perhaps this was all foreshadowed back

in the 5th-century BCE when the philosopher Lao-Tse penned his famous saying:

"If you tell me, I will listen. If you show me, I will see. But if you let me experience, I

will learn" (quoted in Ranjan, 1994)

 30

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