DEVELOPING CAPACITY TO ADDRESS SOCIETAL ISSUES: PRINCIPLES AND EXAMPLES FROM INTEGRATE

Creating a sustainable and just society requires both an Earth-literate public and a workforce that can bring geoscience to bear on challenging societal issues. To this end, the InTeGrate Project has developed five principles to guide curriculum development: 1) connect geoscience learning to grand challenges facing society; 2) develop students’ ability to address interdisciplinary problems; 3) improve students’ geoscientific thinking skills; 4) develop student activities using authentic and credible geoscience data; that 5) foster systems thinking. InTeGrate developed teaching materials are reviewed using a robust assessment rubric to ensure they meet these five goals and tested in a minimum of three intsitutions.. The materials, developed by teams of faculty that span geoscience, social science, humanities, and other STEM disciplines are being used across the curriculum, from introductory general education to advanced levels. The InTeGrate website (http://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/index.html) provides access both to the materials and to communities of adopting faculty. In addition, the website provides numerous resources for faculty designing transdisciplinary project based learning including pedagogic methods for connecting learning to the world we live in, strategies for building interdisciplinary connections, and ideas for teaching integrative topics such as environmental justice, geo-ethics, and risk and resilience. Further, the InTeGrate design rubric can be used as a checklist to ensure that your teaching uses effective pedagogic practices while capitalizing on the guiding principles.