PLACE-BASED PEDAGOGIES BUILD UNDERGRADUATE GEOSCIENCE CONTENT KNOWLEDGE AND CAREER SKILLS

Place-based education increases engagement and enhances achievement by capitalizing on students' connections to local landscapes and communities, but it has most commonly been applied in primary and secondary schools. However, many place-based pedagogies can easily be adapted for use in field-oriented undergraduate geoscience major courses such as geomorphology, watershed hydrology, and soil genesis.

Field notes provide a cross-cutting example, with ramifications for both student learning and development of an important career skill. In the process of learning to take effective field notes, students build their observational skills and learn to document their observations. Journaling is a common component of place-based education, and many of the techniques for guiding and encouraging journaling can be adapted to improve students' field notes in geoscience courses. Furthermore, through use of their own field notes to complete quizzes, trip reports and lab reports, students experience a self-reinforcing feedback loop that can dramatically improve their field note taking as well as their grasp of disciplinary concepts.

Use of journaling, project-based activities, team learning and other place-based pedagogies can result in increased learning of important and practical career skills, as well as deeper and more integrated learning of geoscience concepts. Moreover, through meaningful and contextually relevant exposure to the geoscience-related activities of local and regional organizations, contractors, corporations, municipalities and agencies, students encounter geoscience career opportunities they may not have known about or considered previously.