THE CHANGES IN EARTH AND SPACE SCIENCE EDUCATION EXPLORED AS A SHIFT IN PARADIGMS OF EDUCATION

Changes in Earth and space science education are often discussed in terms of classroom techniques, but the changes are more fundamental. At the core is a change in education paradigms, from teaching-centered to learning-centered. Discussions of educational changes often turn to confrontation or become pointless because we do not realize that we subscribe to one or the other of these paradigms and that they provide us with frames of reference for perceiving, interpreting, and making sense of how we educate students. Discussion is further hampered in that the teaching-centered paradigm is "invisible" to most faculty who subscribe to it. This invisibility allows the instructor to consider his or her teaching to be a "a force of nature," impossible to alter. Many instructors professing learning-centered aims are in practice teaching-centered, with a resulting conflict between aims and practice.

The basic differences between the paradigms begin with the amount of reflection on teaching required of the instructor-very little by the teaching-centered paradigm, very much by the learning-centered paradigm. Reflection centers on hunting assumptions. The assumptions of the two paradigms differ about the important elements of education and the educational goals that follow from these assumptions. In order for followers of the different paradigms to satisfy their different assumptions, achieve their different goals, and yet be aligned with different approaches to assessment, they must use different teaching methods or use the same methods differently. It is these teaching methods that have received most of the attention, usually out of context and often with a misunderstanding of the reasons for their use. The context for selecting the teaching methods is the paradigm, and it determines even the educational values and beliefs held by the instructors. Expression of these different educational values and beliefs is found in the contrasting sense of instructors' responsibilities, students' responsibilities, the instructor-students relationship, the duty to motivate and mentor students, and the nature of students' goals. The two paradigms also differ about the necessity for teaching graduate students to teach. Discussion of the educational changes is exacerbated by imprecise terminology. The result is that apparent confrontations in the discussion are often people "talking past" each other.

Although the paradigms have been considered to grade into each other, they are opposites with a boundary that is drawn by whether the defining principle of an instructor's teaching philosophy is stated as "I teach geoscience to students and expect (want) them to learn it" or "I help students to learn, specifically to learn geoscience, by the way I teach them." The appearance of a gradation between the paradigms results from the very common cross paradigms borrowing of teaching methods by instructors who have not accepted the defining principle and assumptions underpinning the paradigmatic application of that teaching method or reflected critically on their teaching.

Presenting the paradigms explicitly and calling attention to the imprecise terminology may help better define the discussion of changes in Earth and space science education.