GEOSCIENCE SKETCHING IN THE CLASSROOM

Sketching actively engages geoscience students. By making a sketch students have to first see what they are looking at, then they have to start thinking about what they are looking at, and finally they have to make a sketch of their observations. To develop these skills, four UT Dallas geoscience undergraduates took a geoscience sketching class for one hour a week during the spring 2016 semester. The class started by teaching students how to make observations through a photo based project. Students took a photo of an outcrop near where they lived and annotated the photo with what they saw. Subsequent classes were split into three 20 minute sections. During the first section, students critiqued each other’s outcrop sketches from the previous class in order to understand how other people saw their sketches. During the second section, students made interval sketches of the same object over an increasing amount of time in order to develop their sketching skills, starting with a 5 second sketching interval and ending with an 8 minute sketching interval. The remaining 20 minutes were spent introducing a new image of an outcrop and giving students 10 minutes to sketch what they observed. Outcrop sketches were collected every week and presented during the next class section while interval sketches were collected at the end of the semester. Twice during the semester, students were asked to sketch an outcrop that they had sketched earlier in the semester. During the course of the semester, students showed improvement in their observational and sketching skills. Furthermore, one student remarked that the skills that they learned in the class helped them make observations during field camp. By promoting sketching in the classroom, instructors promote an active learning environment, which builds the necessary skills for learning and fieldwork.