STUDYING SCIENTIFIC CONTROVERSIES THROUGH THE LENS OF KATRINA

The events surrounding Hurricane Katrina provided impetus for two curricular projects in the 2005-06 academic year, which began about 10 days after Katrina made landfall. These projects introduced students to ongoing controversies about the record of hurricane strength and frequency, the relationship of hurricanes to global climate change, and the soils-related causes of levee failures in New Orleans.

For a fall first-year seminar on “Geology and Human Health,” students started with a reading/information literacy project about hurricanes that introduced them to: close reading of a journal article (Emanuel, 2005), related journal articles and the scientific commentaries on these articles; constructing graphs of hurricane frequency from NOAA publications on hurricanes since 1492; locating and evaluating popular news stories about hurricane magnitude and frequency before and after Katrina; and evaluating arguments about changing hurricane magnitude and frequency and the relationship of hurricane strength to global warming. In the first week of a spring trimester course on Geology of Soils, students prepared posters and powerpoint presentations on the geologic setting of New Orleans and the controversy about why levees failed. These posters and presentations were used on March 31 during the all-college symposium “Confronting Katrina: How Should We Respond?” (http://apps.carleton.edu/events/katrina/katrina_day/) Interacting with other Carleton community members at the March 31 poster session helped students understand the usefulness of the information they compiled and boosted their confidence in their own knowledge.