USING AN INTERCONTINENTAL SCHOLAR-TEACHER MODEL FOR UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION

For many decades, the Teacher-Scholar model has been rightfully applauded for getting our teachers and predominantly undergraduate institutions to use scholarly research as part of our educational goals for students and for themselves. To better prepare our students for scholarly research, we implore the scholar-teacher model, not in the sense of teachers trained in the academic methodologies of teaching, but focusing on the scholarly scientific and field research to train our students through expertly crafted and question-focused geological research experiences through a strong collaboration between our institutions. Our long-term goals are to enhance the quality of higher education, to overcome the fragmentation of higher education between countries and continents, to enhance inter- and transdisciplinarity, to enhance the employability of University graduates, to enhance networking among higher education institutions and research institutions, and to enhance mutual understanding between people and cultures of different continents.

Building on the strengths of two different departments in different geological settings on two continents, our efforts to train students in cutting-edge technologies and research foci have led to a collaboration of undergraduate geoscience education research through our teaching and training endeavors. We utilize typical classroom technologies for communication, and host planned and random meetings using recording capabilities for future playback in the classroom. The online presentations are modular, and can be used to further facilitate student interactions. Using the diverse geological setting of Greece, with abundant complexities and human occupations through time, we are using research to facilitate collaborative training between our two institutions. We have also begun in-person collaborative efforts, starting in Greece in 2014 and expanding to the US in the future. In these research-focused training groups and expeditions, we focus on topics related to sea-level change, sedimentation, geoarchaeology, tectonics, Holocene coastal evolution, and implications of living near the coast.

Our next steps are to further collaborate through both undergraduate and graduate studies, and co-teach specific courses and modular techniques classes.