TEACHING GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP USING CASE STUDIES: A NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY AND INTEGRATED TEMPLATE

In an increasingly connected world, appreciating global issues and developing critical thinking skills is important for preparing students to be effective and engaged global citizens. By involving students actively in learning, case studies foster the development of such abilities. They also provide students with experience and confidence with ill-formed and difficult problems common in real-life situations. Accordingly, we have developed a flexible, robust and effective case study template for teaching Earth and energy resource issues. Our template differs from classic case study formats in two main aspects. First, students are assigned professional roles in organizations that deal with resource issues; e.g. an international oil company, an environmental group, a multinational mining company, a government bureaucracy, an environmental group, or a miner's union. Within these contexts, students are assigned tasks these organizations commonly carry out: e.g. prospecting for gold; exploring for oil/gas; negotiating a mining labor agreement; expanding a coal-fired power station; or preparing a nation's position paper on controlling carbon dioxide emissions. Second, our case study template employs a 3-module structure to divide complex resource issues into manageable 'chunks'. In module 1, we focus on geology, module 2 deals with economics and module 3 addresses social ramifications. To provide each case with relevancy and immediacy, they are placed in current social settings; e.g. oil/gas production-environmental damage in Nigeria, gold mining-HIV/AIDS in South Africa, nuclear power-weapons in Iran, copper mining-indigenous cultures in Peru, or coal use-global warming in China. Our case study template can be readily adopted and adapted to a variety of geoscience courses. Nearly any geologic topic can be addressed by changing the type of professional organization and the assigned task. The 3-module sequence can be expanded to 4- or 5-modules for complex issues or reduced to 1- or 2-modules for simple problems. This flexibility makes our template ideal a variety of geoscience courses. Thus, this class of case studies can replace easily the standard pencil and paper exercises of traditional geology labs thereby creating a more engaging learning environment and better preparing students for citizenship.