CHALLENGES AND SUCCESSES OF TEACHING A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY GEOHISTORY COURSE

Cross-disciplinary courses present several unique challenges and opportunities for students to synthesize ideas and approaches to knowledge across subjects which may not otherwise intersect in a traditional course. Earth processes and human development overlap in innumerable ways that have shaped both the earth and humanity. Distilling these interactions into course material that is both comprehensive and approachable to students requires a deeper level of reflection than one may find in either a geology or history course alone. We developed this GeoHistory course as an upper-division class that students could receive credit for in either history or in geoscience.

Developing this course presented a challenge in curating subject matter that would be both representative of earth-human interactions as well as interesting to students. We chose to organize the course based largely on the chapters of Origins: How the Earth Shaped Humanity by Lewis Dartnell, which we used in lieu of a textbook, beginning with hominid evolution and ending with anthropogenic climate change. Integrating the teaching methods of a professor of history and a professor of geology presented challenges in introducing different disciplinary bodies of knowledge (e.g., historical sources vs. the scientific method), teaching styles, and even evaluation standards and learning outcomes. Creating appropriate course material for upper-division students while not requiring prerequisites in either discipline required a lot of communication between professors.

There were several points of success in this course. There was a high level of student engagement with the material and class participation was consistently lively. Students were interested in the material but felt challenged by ways of thinking foreign to their chosen major, pushing students beyond the normal “comfort zone” of their major. There have been several student requests to offer the course again, indicating that students have been speaking positively about the course with their peers. A final marker of success was the intellectual challenge of learning in a new discipline for the professors teaching the course. Each of us had little background in the other’s field, so we learned from each other alongside the students. This was intellectually engaging and helped us gauge our students' needs and challenges.