BUILDING COMMUNITY AND DEVELOPING ACTIVITIES: A SYNOPSIS OF THE 2023 TEACHING PETROLOGY WORKSHOP

In early August, 2023, 29 petrologists gathered in Northampton, MA for a four day Teaching Petrology Workshop. Participants came from institutions ranging from undergraduate only colleges to R1 research universities, all with the focus on teaching Petrology or Earth Materials to undergraduate students. The main focus of the workshop was to integrate online teaching resources that were necessary during the peak of the COVID19 pandemic to the modern classroom, while highlighting the importance of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) in pedagogical practices. To do this, the workshop began with a series of discussions on effective teaching, JEDI in the classroom, the use of online resources, and the importance of field-based geoscience education. From there, participants brainstormed ways to integrate resources that were developed during COVID19 pandemic and before (such as John Brady’s interactive petrology website (1)). They then developed new activities that can be easily adapted to use online resources, which ranged from building a database of short ‘warm-up’ activities, creating interactive virtual field trips, to utilizing databases to understand thermobarometry. The participants left with the foundation of a class activity, which they continued to develop and implement over the academic year. We anticipate submission of the activities to SERC following their classroom use.

In addition to generating new classroom activities, the workshop provided a space for discussion about the goals of teaching petrology, as nationally hard-rock geology is being reduced from geosciences departments. Questions arose from the workshop that highlighted the concerns about petrology education for undergraduate students, such as ‘how can we modernize petrology to incorporate concepts related to current events (e.g., climate change)?’ These questions have fueled post-workshop conversations and encourage us as educators to continue to evolve our own teaching methods and topics to teach the next generation of geoscientists.

1. https://www.science.smith.edu/~jbrady/petrology/index.php