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GEES Subject Centre Annual Conference 2006 What on Earth… ? Student learning in geography, earth and environmental sciences

In association with the Experiential Learning and Natural and Environmental Sciences and the Centre for Active Learning CETLs

Monday 26-27 June 2006 - The Quality Hotel, Plymouth, Plymouth, Devon

PLUS optional activities:

Closing date for booking / abstracts: extended to Friday 16th June 2006

The GEES Summer Residential conference on Monday and Tuesday 26 and 27 June is designed to explore how to:

Contents

What is this Conference about?

Dealing with key concepts, student misconceptions, and bottlenecks in learning are topical issues in higher education. The GEES Subject Centre Summer Conference will address these issues as they relate to geography, earth and environmental sciences.

The Conference will be centred around participant-led, structured discussion. Opportunities will be provided for GEES learning and teaching practitioners to:

To ensure that the event is of direct relevance, the main themes for discussion will be identified by the participants. These themes might for example include:

and Many others! What are the key ideas and areas in your subject which present particular difficulties for student learning?

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Conference Programme and format

At the beginning of the main event, participants will identify and prioritise the key threshold concepts for the GEES disciplines. These key concepts will then be the focus for the next day’s discussion. Participants will select one topic to work on in a small group. These facilitated ‘learning groups’ will work together for the whole day to discuss the key issues, share experiences and develop possible solutions. Interspersed with the group discussions will be keynote presentations and an opportunity for participants to present examples of their own practice in a ‘swap shop’ style or through posters. The final plenary session will provide the opportunity for each group to hear about the others’ ideas and discussions. After the event, a summary of the discussions will be circulated to all participants. These summaries and other contributions will then be written up for a special edition of the GEES magazine, Planet.

Monday 26th June

1730 Registration

1800 Welcomes & Introduction

1815 Keynotes:

1930 Brainstorm to identify and prioritise key issues and concepts

2000 Dinner and bar (during this time participants will have the opportunity to sign up for the next day’s discussion topics)

Tuesday 27th June

0900 Introduction and allocation of learning groups

0915 Learning group discussion (1): defining and breaking down the key concept

1000 Break & posters

1015 Swap shop presentations

1115 Learning group discussion (2): sharing experiences and discussing examples from the swap shops

1200 Keynote: Banana Benders, Time’s Ticking Toilet, Sandwich Surprise! active learning Antipodean style. Prof. Pat James

1245 Lunch, posters, networking and a stroll on the seafront (weather permitting!)

1400 Learning group discussion (3): bringing it all together, ideas and recommendations for practice

1445 Feedback to the Plenary

1530 Closing remarks and next steps

Tea and coffee

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International speaker profiles

Julie Libarkin is Assistant Professor at the University of Ohio. She is Associate Editor of the Journal of Geoscience Education, including a special issue in 2004 on threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, and was awarded the 2005 Distinguished Speaker, National Association of Geoscience Teachers (NAGT). She is interested in investigating conceptions and cognition, with particular focus on college students, the expert-novice continuum, assessment, and test development.

Patrick James is Head of the School of Natural and Built Environments at the University of South Australia and was previously Associate Dean of Science (Teaching & Learning and Learning Technology) at the University of Adelaide. He has a strong research record in geoscience and a major academic interest in science, especially geoscience, education and Learning Technology development.

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How Can I Contribute?

Participants are invited to bring along examples of their practice to share with colleagues either in the form of posters, handouts or as a 10 minute presentation. Posters and handouts will be on display throughout the conference. The presentations will form part of the ‘swap shop’ session whereby participants will get together in small groups to listen to and then discuss the presentations. This informal, small group presentation mode will allow plenty of time for questions and further explorations.

If you would like to offer an example of practice in any of the above formats, please submit a title and a brief paragraph (no more than 200 words) by Wednesday 31st May.

Exhibitors welcome.

If you are unable to participate but would like to offer a paper on the conference theme for publication in Planet, please contact: planet@gees.ac.uk

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Preconference networking event on research into student learning Monday 26 June 11am-4pm

If you’ve answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions then this event is for you!

The purpose of this free, pre-conference event is to provide you with lots of opportunities for networking, chatting and formal and informal discussions about researching student learning (pedagogic research) in the GEES disciplines. If you are interested in presenting your work you are very welcome to bring along posters for display or handouts to share with the other participants.

1100 Welcome & introduction

1115 Structured networking activities

1300 Buffet lunch & posters

1400 International perspective: This session will offer a brief overview by

1500 UK perspective: Research activities and opportunities arising from the GEES Subject Centre and related Centres for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.

1545 Tea / Coffee & discussion

1615 Summary, close and next steps

Please email Helen.King@plymouth.ac.uk with any queries about this pre-conference event.

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Optional free activities Sunday 25 June

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Swap-shop Presentation Abstracts

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Linking Widening Participation Activity to Learning and Teaching

Dr Andrew Clegg, Tourism Management

University of Chichester

The aim of the presentation is to demonstrate how an activity linked to widening participation has been linked into teaching and learning. Our WP activities have focused on a Destination Management pack developed for Year 10 pupils from local schools. While supervised by staff, the day is primarily facilitated by Tourism Management students. The pack has proved so successful, that the concept has been integrated into the assessment regime for BAM317 Training, Education and Interpretation for Tourism Management. As part of this module, students have to develop their own pack, which will form the basis of a WP event in May, to which local schools have been invited. Students have to work to a clear set of learning outcomes, based around a specific topic that they have covered during their degree. As part of the preparation for assessment the students also have the opportunity to meet the pupils that will be attending in May, and gauge the level at which the materials need to be developed. The WP programme is funding the preparation of the materials and the students will also get paid for running the session. During the minor validation to approve the changes to the assessment regime, our external examiner quoted: 'I must compliment you on yet again developing challenging and innovative modules, which assess students via interesting, diverse, and practical methods…Level 3 students completing this module will gain knowledge and skills which will be of immense and instant value when they enter the workplace'

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Teaching and Learning Scientific Uncertainty: The Case of Climate Change

Brendan Hall, Centre for Active Learning

University of Gloucestershire

Fundamental to the nature of science is the concept that much is still unknown and uncertain in the universe. This is a key concept in science and, as such, should be understood by students studying scientific disciplines at higher education level. However, this can be an extremely difficult concept for students to grasp, as they generally prefer to deal in 'truths' and facts and will tend to seek out a correct answer to any question. Scientific uncertainty may, therefore, be viewed as 'troublesome knowledge'. It also fits the framework of threshold concepts, in that once students have an understanding of scientific uncertainty their conceptions will change to a more sophisticated way of thinking about science. In the course of the research, which is still very much in the early stages, it is proposed that teaching and learning climate change will be used as a case study to investigate students' conceptions of scientific uncertainty.

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Tripping through troublesome thresholds: computer modelling and learning about change in environmental systems

David Riley

Centre for Educational Development, Imperial College London

This presentation discusses Meyer and Land's framework1 by re-interpreting research into learning about environmental change2. The research was based in the former University of North London, where many written accounts of system behaviour were poorly articulated. A module for second and third year undergraduates was launched in the hope that students' experiences of manipulating computer models and of writing project reports would improve their written expression. The research adapted Fairclough's approach to critical discourse analysis3, which relates local actions (categorized as action, representation and identification) to wider practices and to long-term cultural change.

For a student to imbue her modelling activities with appropriate meanings, it was found she had to engage with and orchestrate three complementary sets of actions:

Two questions arise from this re-interpretation and are posed for discussion:

  1. Students' mental states have to be inferred from meanings ascribed to their actions. Should we aim to identify diagnostic threshold actions?
  2. Should Meyer and Land's framework be extended to admit combinations of threshold actions?

1 Meyer, J.H.F. & Land, R. (2005) Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (2): Epistemological considerations and a conceptual framework for teaching and learning, Higher Education 49, 373-388.

2 Riley, D.P. Doctoral thesis being submitted in 2006.

3 Fairclough, N. (2003) Analysing Discourse: Textual analysis for social research, London: Routledge.

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Measurement? Units? Just in Time!

Brian Whalley, School of Geography Archaeology and Palaeoecology

Queens University Belfast

Laboratory and fieldwork experiments are good ways to engender active learning. Yet experience shows that many students interested in physical geography do not have a good science background. They don't like, so have difficulty with: numbers, equations and graphs - etc. How can they cope with geomorphology (let alone meteorology)? Although the appreciation of experiments helps student understanding, this can fade at the data analysis and interpretation stages.

Units are at the heart of science and thus of field and lab experiments, from river discharge to slope failure. Students will happily calculate Manning's formula to give a stream velocity of 10ms-1 without a murmur. Reflection should (!) show that this is not reasonable. Appreciation of the units as well as their values can bring a better understanding of the physics behind the experiments. How can we instil this appreciation? Remedial instruction is one possibility but this can be humiliating, web support perhaps too passive. So, are there ways which can instruct students who don't know, support students who think they know and stretch students who do know? Maybe. This paper suggests a few ideas with 'Just in Time Teaching' (JiTT) whereby pre-exercise (lecture, lab or fieldwork) supports these requirements. JiTT can be used to give 'warm-up' tasks before the main instruction (perhaps related to PBL). Knowledge of commonplace measurements and units, coupled with small tasks can help. Students may need some time to do this appreciation (hence warm up). I will show examples linking JiTT to web-based practice.

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Reflecting upon reflection - an anlaysis of the student voice

Paul Wright* and Shelagh Waddington†

*School of Maritime and Coastal Studies, Southampton Solent University
†Department of Geography, National University of Ireland Maynooth

Currently, the PDP agenda is not one that needs to be stringently followed in Irish universities. Therefore, students often have no space within their learning to adequately reflect upon their skills and abilities, in order to prepare themselves for applying for jobs, or to consider the fit of their personal skill set with that required by the world of work.

This GEES funded project centres upon a unit developing methods of geographical research and enquiry to Level Two geographers at NUI, Maynooth. On-going reflection on the process was captured through on-line journals, or blogs. Final assessment in this unit takes the form of a project, and a c.v. building exercise based upon their experiences during the unit. This paper reports upon the mechanics of the project itself, and analyses a number of sets of complimentary student evaluations.

Many students reported a degree of disquiet with the reflective process. Responses suggested that there was a polarisation in opinion as to the role of the reflective process within learning. Further analysis showed that issues of clearer expectations, preparedness with regard to IT skills, and the process of reflection in general were raised. These results appear to be in contradiction of the general literature on student reflection, which tends to focus on the process being positive, affirmative in nature, and helpful to the students. Suggestions as to why this dissonance might have arisen are given.

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Learning through Innovative Assessment

Ms Sue Heard and Dr. Malcolm Hole

Discipline of Geography and Environment, and Discipline of Geology School of Geosciences University of Aberdeen

This academic year 2005 - 2006 saw the innovation of a cross-discipline course in the School of Geosciences, at the University of Aberdeen. An Honours option, Volcanic Hazards; Human and Environmental Impacts was taught by a member of staff from Geography and Environment, and from Geology. This provided opportunities to develop innovative assessment. Rowntree (1994) stated that the more ways we test our students, the better we shall know them. This idea was implemented in 3 course assessments. Each student had to compile a USGS factsheet for the first assessment, in a public-friendly style suitable for publication. Third year students then had to write a report for the Minister of the Interior, on appropriate levels of managing the hazard and monitoring a hypothetical volcano, Quetzal in Guatemala, for the second assessment while Fourth year students managed a volcanic hazard, in small groups and completed a working report, whilst reacting to changing volcanic scenarios. They then gave a press presentation, at which Third Year students, acting as press reporters, provided peer-assessment.

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Using a “Studio Teaching” approach to improve problem solving ability in Structural Geology

Alan Boyle, Graham Potts, Maggie Williams, Peter Williams

Dept Earth & Ocean Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3GP

A two-year TQEF project to replace a traditional lectures and practical format for teaching Year 1 & Year 2 structural geology courses by an innovative “studio teaching” approach to teaching is in progress in the Department of Earth & Ocean Sciences at Liverpool University.

The project aims to replace two traditional lecture-practical modules with a more open-ended, inquiry-based way of working that encourages students’ involvement in group-work activities. Objectives are to improve students’ development of higher-order cognitive skills (understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation) and to improve students’ preparation for problem-solving work in the future.

The theory is that students working in groups around tables (rather than sitting in rows of benches/seats facing the class teacher), and being presented with open-ended, inquiry based problems to solve (rather than passively receiving knowledge), will become more adept in coping with practical work, be helped to develop higher-order cognitive skills and be better prepared for future independent work as individuals or as team members (e.g. Handelsman et al. 2004; Perkins 2005).

Year 1 & 2 structural geology modules originally comprised twelve lectures and six 3-hour practicals. In the new studio format, modules are delivered with twelve 2-3 hour studio sessions. As the project progresses, although underlying objectives of learning (the curriculum content) will remain essentially the same; there will be changes in presentation mode and content. Changes have necessitated initial modifications to a teaching room to cover minor works, provide storage of studio resources and upgrade of the AV facilities.

Project evaluation includes analysis of existing student feedback and exam performance, observation and recording of student perceptions during studio sessions and comparison with same student perceptions in traditional-mode modules running in parallel. Examinations will be delivered in same format to 'pre' and 'post' students to facilitate comparisons using metrics similar to those reported by Roy (2003).

The project started in November 2005 and the first year module was delivered in the new format in January-March 2006. Preliminary results and implications will be presented.

References.

Handelsman, J., Ebert-May, D., Beichner, R., Bruns, P., Chang, A., DeHaan, R., Gentile, J., Lauffer, S., Stewart, J., Tilghman, S. M. & Wood, W. B., 2004. EDUCATION: Scientific Teaching. Science, 304(5670), 521-522.

Perkins, D., 2005. The Case for a Cooperative Studio Classroom: Teaching Petrology in a Different Way. Journal of Geoscience Education, 53, 101-109.

Roy, H., 2003. Studio vs Interactive Lecure Demonstration - Effects on Student learning. Bioscene, 29, 3-6.

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e-Learning in Environmental Chemistry: simulating environmental surveys using custom software

Emilia Bertolo

Geographical and Life Sciences, Canterbury Christ Church University, CT1 1QU meb27@canterbury.ac.uk

Conducting an environmental survey of a potentially contaminated area require a sound knowledge of a variety of scientific disciplines. Case studies based on “real” projects in a “virtual scenario” can be a way to bridge the gap between academia and professional practice. e-Learning methods such as computer simulations can be used to recreate the immediacy and complexity of of the workplace. This paper describes an exercise using custom made software capable simulating environmental surveys. The aim was to enhance students’ understanding of the complexities involved in monitoring environmental pollutants. The exercise was conducted in a special session with a group of 80 students, consisting of 20 students from a level 2 module in Environmental Chemistry, and 60 visiting students from the Ecole Technique Supérieure de Chimie de l'Ouest, France.

Students were asked to conduct an environmental survey to assess the potential Cd contamination in a fictitious area called Priory Bottom, where a metal smelter was situated. The students’ objective was to assess whether the area was suitable for agricultural purposes regarding the Cd levels, in accordance with current UK legislation. The session was built around custom software, JPollution, developed by Dr S. Clay (Department of Physics, Imperial College London); the program had been tested before in smaller groups (ca.15 students) but this was the first time it was used with a group this size.

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Colouring in the Emotional Language of Place

Martin Haigh

Oxford Brookes University

The challenge was to create a 2-week exercise to explore empathy in a Geographical context. This arose during the design of a final semester module called “The Ethical Geographer”, which was constructed on four pillars: ethics, empathy, environment (sustainable development) and employment and billed as an exploration of the student’s self, its potential and responsibilities. The class enrols >50 students, mainly from geography and physical geography. Most geography students had been exposed to the ideas of cultural geography but physical geographers had not. Any exercise would have to involve all, equally, in a creative consideration of the complex relationship between place, environment, and cultural meaning–‘haunting, place and discourse’, and their emotional impacts. It would need to say something new to those from cultural geography and be accessible to those others. It demanded a teaching device that was simple, relevant but outside the box of British cultural geography.

Undergraduate cultural geography tends to focus on Western thinking. Elsewhere, Vedic scripture, Classical Yoga and the Samkhya Philosophy tell us that material nature is composed of three strands called gunas. Sattva guna, represented by the colour white, inspires purity and serenity, rajoguna, red, inspires passion, movement and creativity, while tamas guna, black, inspires negativity, ignorance and dullness. Everything is constructed from these ‘primary colours’. Consider, photographs may show places near, far away, big or small, but, whether they depict Jordan or Jaipur, all emerge from ink of three primary colours. Equally, the gunas may colour the pixels of emotional mapping.

The class-work engaged student teams of 3 in evaluating the emotional impact of their local area. Maps, produced as posters, illustrate these places’ ‘emotional language’ at different times of day. Each student also prepared a personal reflective statement entitled: “Designing Better Habitats”. Student reactions are analysed.

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The Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences,
Buckland House, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth, PL4 8AA
Email: info@gees.ac.uk Tel: ++44 1752 584529 Fax: ++44 1752 584880