AN EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING APPROACH TO ENGAGE DIVERSE STUDENT GROUPS WITH CLIMATE CHANGE ISSUES: FROM GEOSCIENCE TO SUSTAINABILITY

Climate change has emerged as the defining issue of the century for humanity with far-reaching impacts beyond the scientific community. Geoscientists play a vital role in understanding the pace, mechanism, and consequence of Earth system change and disseminating critical and factual information to society. New approaches to attract diverse student populations, especially women-identified, racial and ethnic minorities, and international students who are disproportionally underrepresented in geoscience fields but more affected by the climate changes are urgently needed. We advocate for an experiential learning approach to enhance learning of climate change and to effectively and creatively communicate the evidence of climate change to wider student populations. We illustrate the advantage of such an experiential learning approach using the “Clarkia Miocene Climate Change Workshop: Facts, Forces, and Future,” an NSF-funded interdisciplinary and collaborative research and education program. The world-renowned Miocene Clarkia Lake in northern Idaho is closely associated with the Columbia River Basalt volcanic activities that dammed a local drainage system and preserved diverse and exquisite plant fossils and biomolecules. Our recent radiometric dating of associated volcanic ash places the annually-resolved deposit at 15.78 ± 0.039 Ma, associated with the Miocene Climate Optimum. The atmospheric CO₂ concentrations during that period was at the level that the human society is projected to reach in the coming decades, making it an attractive analogue to visualize the impact of near-future warming. Designed to attract underrepresented students, several components were deliberately built into the real-world experience in questioning, reflection, and application process on top of the geoscience program to motivate and empower diverse student groups. Due to its global nature with differential local impacts, multi-disciplinary academic characteristics, and cross-cultural components, climate change topics are ideally suited in experiential learning programs with international perspectives, thus having the potential to generate life-long active engagements beyond traditional university settings for students to make a difference in the rapidly changing world.