DR. JOHN M. DENNISON, EDUCATOR EXTRAORDINAIRE

For his Paleozoic Stratigraphy graduate course, Dr. John M. Dennison had students complete a project which was very valuable in terms of learning to find information in the literature (more of a challenge in the pre-Google era than today), learning to work as part of a team, and learning to compile regional geologic data.

The class was given a specific geologic period for the project, the country was split up geographically among the participants, and students were responsible for finding basic geologic information (lithology, thickness, presence of unconformities, etc.) about their assigned area in the literature. All of the data were compiled onto a series of maps (lithofacies, isopach, subcrop, supercrop, etc.) by the team members and used to make an interpretation of the geologic history for the selected period.

This project could be used today with computer literature searches and GIS software for map making to produce similar results with the same valuable lessons learned by students enrolled in a graduate-level stratigraphy course.