New Models for Geoscience Workforce Preparation: Curriculum Reform, Shifting Faculty Work, and Entrenched Academic Organizational Structures

American colleges and universities have a number of important stakeholders and goals, including preparing and sustaining an educated workforce, generation of new knowledge, and solving societal issues. Unfortunately, shifting funding patterns and increased institutional competition for reputation has driven faculty to focus on research. Hence, capacity is missing when workforce demands increase.

In seeking models that overcome these issues by integrating the educational and research missions of the university, we have focused on faculty as the best agent of change. Achieving faculty buy-in to reform requires an understanding of faculty's conceptions on teaching and learning and how these conceptions impact the teaching practices utilized in the classroom. Interviews of teaching faculty and classroom observations were conducted to assess the impact of the teaching faculty's conceptions of teaching and learning on actual teaching practices. Classroom observations were conducted to determine the level of student-teacher interaction and cognitive complexity of the material being covered by utilizing the Mathematics Science Classroom Observation Profile System (M-SCOPS). Both the surveys and classroom observations indicated that naïve understanding of how students learn, especially differences between novices and experts, drove teaching practice. Our analysis also indicated that faculty have limited knowledge of alternatives to lecture-centered classrooms.

I argue that authentic inquiry may serve as a boundary object to support structured synergy between research and teaching, serving to reduce the major dichotomy in faculty work, develop the cognitive skills in students to integrate academic knowledge and experiential knowledge, recruit students to the discipline and develop a highly-skilled workforce. Such as shift will likely require better university-industry partnerships. These roles support Vannevar Bush's vision of universities as knowledge entities that build capacity through seeking new knowledge and transferring it to a new workforce.