THE SPECIAL PLACE PROJECT: USE AND EFFICACY OF A PLACE-BASED CASE STUDY APPROACH TO TEACHING GEOSCIENCE IN A 2-YEAR COLLEGE

Junior and community colleges currently account for half of the nation’s new college students. With projected shortages in geoscience professionals at all levels anticipated in the coming decade, recruiting future geoscientists from this non-traditional population is increasingly crucial to the future of the geosciences. While some of these students can be recruited to 4-year geoscience programs, many will be unable to pursue such opportunities in the short-term due to the logistical constraints, which led them to pursue a 2-year degree in the first place. Can the limited course options of a 2-year college provide a capstone geoscience experience to serve as a foundation for future work in the geosciences? Place-based approaches offer one strategy for achieving this objective.

This presentation explores use of a semester long place-based case study approach in a stand-alone general education geoscience course at a community college. The Special Place Project combines instruction in geoscience content with development of observation, reasoning, and writing skills. Students select the locations for their individual case studies affording development of personal connections between learner and environment. The project is unique in placing all course instruction in the context of the quest to explore and gain understanding of the student’s chosen location by using the inherently more generalized course content required by the curriculum. By modeling how geoscientists approach their research questions with an actual student geoscience question, this pedagogical technique not only integrates knowledge and skills but captures the excitement of scientific thinking on real world geoscience problems directly relevant to students’ lives. The impact of this technique on student learning of “observable” geology (geomorphologic features and surface processes) relative to more abstract concepts not easily observed by a layperson (subsurface Earth structure and tectonic processes) will be quantitatively examined.