THE VISION AND IMPACT OF CLASSROOM AND FIELD EDUCATION DESIGNED BY ED EVENSON

Workforce development has risen to the attention of professional societies as well as academia over the past few years, with an increasingly widening gap between the topics that are made available to the new generations of students and the skills that are required from early career professionals by a job market that has grown hungry for new talents. The push for critical minerals, alternative energy, carbon sequestrations, has uncovered a worrisome truth that has been several years in the making: “we” don’t train enough well-rounded geoscientists, and a cliff is on the horizon when there won’t be adequate number of professionals to address the challenges of the booming mineral-heavy economy. It’s back to the teachers, to the mentors and to visionary educators the task to revitalize the many “lost arts” like petrography, mineralogy, economic geology, sedimentology and the long list of topics that as a community “we have been told should not be mentioned”, are seemingly impossible to fund, and unfortunately yet not surprisingly are now in short supply.

A charismatic teacher at Lehigh University, Ed Evenson provided, over the course of his entire career, tremendous opportunities to students of all levels for developing the necessary skills to be successful in a journey through Earth Sciences, and life. From capturing the attention of undecided freshmen in large lecture halls with his unmistakable character and the frequent joke, to the Research Experience for Undergraduate run in the magic wilderness of Alaska, to exposing scores of majors to the heart-capturing vastitude (and geology) of the west thorough the programs of the Lehigh University field camp, the impact of Ed’s teaching extends beyond generations of geoscientists, many of whom still profess Ed’s creed in classrooms around the globe.

With a character that was hard to miss, and occasionally hard to live up to, Ed’s style offered very little compromises, together with lessons that are as relevant today as they were at the beginning of Ed’s career.

Ed's vision for geoscience education combined several important skills including observation, map construction, vigorous physical activity, mental toughness, and exploration. Ed could see the big picture and weave natural and cultural education together in a captivating and enduring way. His style was unique and effective and stands as a model for the next generation of educators.