DEVELOPING A NEW UNDERGRADUATE SCIENCE COURSE FOCUSED ON HISPANIC STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS: GEOGRAPHY, RESOURCES, AND ENVIRONMENT OF LATIN AMERICA

We are developing a new lower-division science course entitled “Geography Resources, and Environment of Latin America”, or GRELA. GRELA is an interdisciplinary exploration of how the natural history of Mexico, Central America, and South America has influenced the prehistory, history, culture, and economy of Latin America. The main objectives of our course is to stimulate interest among Hispanic undergraduate non-science majors by highlighting scientific issues that affect Latin America, and to increase non-Hispanic student understanding of this region. The course is supported by a grant from NSF and is being developed jointly between the Geosciences and the Science Education departments. The course consists of 21 lectures ordered in 7 modules and requires the student to make an oral presentation about some topic of his/her choice that was explored with a correspondent from a Latin American university. The course begins with 5 synoptic lectures, including a geography pretest and overviews of Latin American physical and cultural geography, a plate tectonic overview, and geologic history. This is followed by a series of modules that relate the natural resources and environment to the history, economy, and culture of the region. The metals module includes five lectures. The third module consists of three lectures on energy resources. Following the first midterm, the fourth module consists of two lectures on earthquake and volcanic hazards. The fifth module focuses on the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and cryosphere, with three lectures on the Trade Winds and El Niño, glaciers, and the Amazon river. Following the second midterm is a biosphere module (2 lectures) on the Amazon rain forest and coral reefs of the region. The final module and lecture concerns water resources along the US-Mexico border. Grades are based on two midterms, a final, and the report. We taught this class for the first time to 7 students and are now in the process of evaluating it. One of the problems that we have encountered is the lack of a suitable text, but we have dealt with this problem by distributing CD-ROMs which include all lectures as PowerPoint presentations. We are actively seeking faculty from other universities and community colleges who would like to offer a similar course, and will share materials. We plan to offer the course again in Fall 2004.