BROADENING ADOPTION OF TEACHING ABOUT THE EARTH IN A SOCIETAL CONTEXT WITH THE INTEGRATE WEBINAR SERIES

Major earth-related issues impact all components of society and require interdisciplinary approaches to create sustainable solutions. The InTeGrate project developed teaching materials that address the grand challenges facing society and foster interdisciplinary systems thinking. These materials focus on developing students’ ability to address interdisciplinary problems, improving students’ geoscientific thinking skills, and increasing the use of geoscience data. To broaden the community teaching about Earth in a societal context, including use of teaching materials, the InTeGrate project offered an eight-webinar series that took place from February to June 2016. It will continue offering a webinar series during fall 2016.

The spring 2016 webinars focused on topics such as environmental justice, building sustainability into your non-science class, improving climate literacy, teaching with data, and teaching about soils as a critical resource. The webinars were one hour in length and included a reflection period at the end to promote discussion. Featuring InTeGrate authors and leaders of departmental and institutional implementation programs, the webinars showcased teaching activities and examples of their use in a wide range of settings. More than 250 individuals participated in one or more webinars and 40% of the participants were unfamiliar with InTeGrate. Participants had a broad geographic distribution and were from all types of institutions, including 6% of participants from minority serving institutions.

The InTeGrate webinar series will continue in the fall with topics including natural hazards and risks, water and society, energy and atmosphere, biosphere and critical zone, integrating sustainability into your course, and tracing environmental contaminants. These topics all have clear components of geoscience, but interdisciplinary partnerships will provide a deeper and more thorough discussion. The series aims to continue broadening adoption of teaching strategies, activities, and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as improving collaboration and learning between module authors of topically related modules.