DESIGNING AN ENVIRONMENTAL GEOLOGY COURSE USING EXPERIENTIAL CAREER PREPARATION AND ROLE PLAYING

Environmental Geology is a multi-faceted field of study that can be challenging to teach because the area is so broad. Additionally, course topics often interface with fields of study outside of geology sensu stricto, like engineering, environmental chemistry, economics, or environmental justice and geology faculty may be asked to teach a course like this even if this is not in their area of specialization. While it can be initially challenging, the broad and multidisciplinary nature of environmental geology presents an opportunity for designing a course that can use regional resources to expose students to career paths that they may not have considered otherwise.

The upper-level Environmental Geology course described here was designed as a product of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers Cutting Edge Workshop on Environmental Geology. During the course of a semester, the author makes use of local resources and community partners to teach this topic through on-campus lectures and labs combined with a series of eight field trips and paired technical report assignments. Students participate in environmental justice and sustainability tours of their city, shadow employees at an environmental consulting firm, and tour a limestone quarry, municipal landfill, power generation station, coal surface mine, and wastewater treatment plant. Following each field trip, students are asked to role play as an intern at an environmental consulting company and write a technical report describing the assets, drawbacks and future impacts of the environmental issues witnessed on that field trip.

The experience of visiting and writing about these topics not only exposes students to the technical aspects of environmental problems and infrastructure, but also allows the students to interact with environmental professionals in their workplaces. Since this course was launched in 2013, a number of students secured paid internships at these locations after the course concluded, and were subsequently offered full-time employment after graduation. While direct career development was not the primary objective of this course design, the results clearly indicate that this role playing pedagogical strategy is beneficial to the students beyond increasing content knowledge and technical writing abilities.