VALUES STATEMENT AND "ROBUSTLY USEFUL IDEAS" AS GEOLOGY DEPARTMENT PLANNING TOOLS

As part of long-range department planning , Carleton College geology faculty have identified and articulated nine values that we strive to maintain in our dealings with each other as students, faculty, staff, and alumni. We didn't originate these values, but we are trying to integrate them into all aspects of department planning and into all courses, beginning with Introductory Geology. The values are: 1) intellectual honesty, 2) responsibility of knowledge, 3) sharing of knowledge, 4) connections of knowledge, 5) fostering a community of personal and intellectual respect, 6) cooperation, 7) open-mindedness and humility, 8) joy of learning and discovery, and 9) the value of a scientific mode of inquiry.

Geology is distinctive among academic fields of study at liberal arts colleges in several respects. An education in geology should provide students with: · the ability to visualize, understand, and use spatial relationships in two and three dimensions; · the ability to identify and understand temporal relationships, along with a grasp of the depth of geologic time; · the ability to reason from incomplete information; · an understanding of Earth processes in order to become an informed citizen. These concepts underlie all geologic work.

Through the values and the unique characteristics of geology, we strive to foster the first-order skills in the matrix described in the accompanying abstract by Savina, et al. We have identified several "Robustly Useful Ideas" that cut across many subfields in geology. We endeavor to articulate these ideas for students during courses, field trips and other department activities so that they are certain to encounter them in more than one place. The current (but evolving) list of these ideas is: taxonomy, equilibria, modes of change, systems, scale, entropy, discrete-nondiscrete properties, diffusion, evolution, the inverse problem, and the method of multiple working hypotheses.