FIELD COURSE SYLLABUS REFORM: WHAT STUDENTS REALLY NEED TO LEARN

An ongoing revolution in geological map visualization and interpretation is being driven by technologies that were unimaginable just a decade ago, and we have been busy incorporating new exercises into JMU's (formerly BU's) summer field course. To create space for new methods, we must consider whether long-established exercises are still essential. Caution is needed in both adding and deleting course content, as the curriculum may suffer from inclusion of new technologies that turn out to be short-lived and from discontinuation of exercises that develop students' core field expertise. Nevertheless, we advocate major changes in how we teach students to work in the field and we question the continued relevance of some existing procedures. Our criteria include levels of pedagogical engagement and transferability of skills to non-geoscience professions.

The health of an academic discipline can be measured by the number and quality of new ideas that emerge from current research, and the efficiency with which obsolete skills are removed from the curriculum. Tomorrow's students need to make connections across sub-disciplines within a current research problem environment. They must be able to link geology to climate to environmental impact to resources. If they are to learn to view the Earth as a intricately interacting, four-dimensional dynamic system, they must be relieved of rote learning chores. Given new technology such as wifi video cellphones, students have access to vast stores of information right at the outcrop. They don't need to memorize as much as past generations did, but they do need to efficiently integrate and apply this information to the task at hand.

To optimize field course syllabi to future requirements of industry and upper-level academia, we propose to:

1) Drastically reduce paper-based exercises. Manual plotting techniques for stereograms and block diagrams, for example, were never of much pedagogical value and are obsolete.

2) Greatly reduce rote memorization and increase on-site information access. Students don't need to “know,” rather they need to be able to instantly “find out.”

3) Emphasize the societal significance of field science. Students must be trained to distinguish the most important issues and convey them to non-experts.