PLACE-BASED INITIATIVES FOR URBAN STUDENTS OF INTRODUCTORY GEOSCIENCE COURSES IN BROOKLYN

Brooklyn College is an urban commuter campus with a diverse student population from over 100 countries and speaking 95 languages. Thus freshman geoscience students lack a common lens through which to perceive and integrate their campus-based experiences. In addition, the majority of our students are first generation college attendees, which results in a lack of common experience and expectation with respect to campus culture and general college-education requirements. The one point of student commonality is their home setting of Brooklyn, with 77% of our students living in Brooklyn and an additional 17% residing within the remaining four NYC boroughs. Place-based curricula that focus on the NYC urban environment thereby provide an anchor onto which to secure less familiar classroom concepts. In addition, most first-generation college students are driven to improve their economic standing and quality of life in their adopted home community. Accordingly, we have redeveloped our freshman geoscience offerings to emphasize place-based learning that focuses on the immediate urban environment. Our traditional introductory majors courses (physical geology followed by historical geology) have been replaced by research-based courses that examine neighborhood-focused environmental topics. In the fall semester, new geology majors document Brooklyn air-quality with respect to particulates. This place-based theme allows for conceptualized content delivery on minerals, rocks, weathering, local geology, weather, geology-health connections, and statistics. Next semester, students document beach characteristics in a dynamic setting of natural, recreational, and infrastructural importance. While collecting data for use by the Gateway National Recreation Area, students learn related concepts in topics such as sedimentology, taphonomy, functional morphology, GIS, and statistics. In non-majors freshman learning communities geology and classics have co-developed multi-week activities that explore the tacit public messages that have been integrated into the architectural environment of Lower Manhattan through the deliberate use of specific building stones and stylistic elements. These activities allow students to study physical properties and identification of rocks and minerals in an urban context.