GEOMORPHOLOGY INSTRUCTION FOCUSED FOR CREATIVE APPLICATIONS

Learning in the earth sciences takes on a different quality when the goal is immediate, specific application to make something new within one’s chosen craft. General education offerings can benefit from this dynamic with a particular audience focus, exemplified here through multiple geomorphology course offerings that specifically recruit students with major disciplines and hobby interests in production of creative works, such as creative writing, the arts, adventure RPG game mastering, architecture and design, crafting, filmmaking, and public/educational engagement with landscape.

These face-to-face and online courses, with titles such as ‘Natural Landscape Expertise for Artists, Storytellers, and World-Builders’, aim to provide a rich scientific knowledge base on natural landscapes, emphasizing material most likely to be useful in creative applications. Topics include realistic landscape characteristics, diverse and unusual landforms in regional context, active landscape-sculpting processes, repeating themes/metaphors employed in the science, and natural alterations of landscape over time. Students demonstrate mastery of the material by its thoughtful incorporation in creative works (concept-development essays; a major final creative project), rather than through traditional testing. Beyond these assignments, students rate several other course components as especially useful toward pursuit of their goals. These include field experiences (ranging from one day to two weeks), opportunities to present personally significant landscape examples and critique existing arts/media representations of landscape, lectures describing environmental conditions and diversity of terrain within major physiographic zones, and an instructor-authored website detailing physical features and narrative potential in more than two dozen natural landscape settings.