PAYING THE 48TH NOBEL CONFERENCE FORWARD: USING STUDENT CAPSTONES TO CREATE A CURRICULUM ON CONTEMPORARY OCEAN ISSUES

One difficulty in performing student-based research at two-year colleges is the high turnover rate among students. Since creating long-term projects requires having a student researcher for a longer period of time, student research at two-year colleges can often rely on taking advantage of a serendipitous event. In Fall 2012, the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley and the Mielke Family Foundation of Appleton, WI came together to create a seminar class around the topics and lessons from the 48^th Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota and that year’s theme of “Our Global Oceans.” The Mielke Family Foundation wanted to encourage the dissemination of important ocean issues throughout the community at large. Topics covered in the seminar included ocean acidification, geopolitics, coral ecology, garbage gyres, and climate change, topics that complemented the research of planned speakers at the conference. Students who took this class were required to attend and participate in the conference. Inspired by what they learned, students chose to create capstone projects that embraced the Mielke’s mission to educate the community and developed lesson plans rooted in the themes from the Nobel Conference: fishery destruction, ocean acidification, coral habitat loss, and carbon absorption. These lesson plans were developed for the seventh grade level, but can easily be adapted for any K-12 level. These lessons are available at http://nobel48.geographer.me for anyone to use.