GROWING GEOLOGISTS IN A GEOSCIENCE GARDEN

A recently installed geoscience garden at SUNY Potsdam has expanded the Geology Department's ability to effectively teach geologic concepts and skills throughout the curriculum. Inspired by similar installations at other institutions, the SUNY Potsdam Geoscience Garden was designed as a mappable geologic structure and the boulders represent the regional geology. Thanks to support from local businesses, rocks in the garden were ‘planted’ with a modest budget, and our approach could be a model for installations at smaller schools with limited resources.

The geoscience garden offers an opportunity to teach skills and concepts throughout the geology program, and we developed a curriculum that integrates the space into most of our core classes. In introductory courses, students will use the garden to identify rocks and minerals, recognize primary and secondary structures, and use a Brunton compass to measure features such as strike and dip. In Historical Geology, the garden will be used to teach stratigraphic principles, geologic time, and introduce students to the regional geology. These skills will be strengthened in Field Methods, when students integrate the basic observations into detailed field notes, use those notes to develop interpretations, and plot their data on a basemap. Junior and senior students in Structural Geology will use the map created in field methods to construct a cross section. Sedimentology and Petrology students will analyze thin sections that correspond to the boulders. The geoscience garden provides a space for course-specific projects that are scaffolded throughout the curriculum. The use of the garden will demonstrate connections between courses and enable students to recognize their growth as geologists.

In the first semester of the installation, we discovered some additional and unforeseen benefits of the geoscience garden. Logistically, the garden provides a safe field experience, is easy to access, and allows instructors to monitor students for individual assessment. The garden has applications beyond the geology curriculum; for example, GIS students have used the space to collect aerial photographs from a drone and compile the data into a three-dimensional image. The geoscience garden has the potential to be a resource to the community as well as a place to grow great geologists.