A personal Experience of Designing Earth System Science Instruction based on Learner-Centered Environment Paradigm

Journal of Geoscience Education, May 2006 by Gautier, Catherine

Comprehending the Earth as a system may end up being fundamental to the life of our students in a few decades. With potentially large changes in climate in the future, there will likely be a need to integrate the complex climate responses to anthropogenic influences into the broad framework of interacting spheres (atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere and oiosphere) that Earth system science (ESS) studies. If this is true, then, what our students really learn from our Earth system science classes will be critical. This places a great responsibility on our shoulders as educators.

ESS education (ESSE) is now in its 15th year of existence, if we count from the start of the USRA ESSE program in 1990 when a group of active researchers undertook a broad education experiment in a field that was, at the time, in the making. Since that time many ESS instruction experiments have been undertaken at various universities. Often, and not surprisingly due to the complexity and novelty of the discipline, these experiences were done without explicitly structuring classroom experiences based on learning principles. At this juncture ESSE is, I believe, now primed to significantly benefit from recent progress in research on how people learn and how to design classroom environments that optimize learning.

Through my 15 years of teaching Earth System Science, I have explored various ways of teaching it and have become convinced that the Learner-Centered Environment, that builds upon constructivist theory principles and fosters teaching practices that recognize the active roles students must play in their learning, is particularly suitable for Earth system science education. Several characteristics encapsulate how learning is conceptualized from this learner-centered perspective. They include students' involvement in the material to be learned, students' acting on the information at a deep level, students' relating the new material to what they already know, students' continually checking and updating their understandings based on new experiences, and students' becoming autonomous learners aware of the learning process. The nature of the knowledge and research environment that characterizes our Earth system science naturally lends itself to the facilitation of student construction of knowledge according to those characteristics mentioned. By providing an active learning experience to students, the LCE effectively offers them both opportunity and motivation to understand this complex area of scientific inquiry and to experience deep, enduring and enjoyable learning. By using a LCE in our classrooms and studying how our students learn in it, we will contribute to the research on learning about a complex science still in the making.

Early on in my career as an Earth system science educator, it became clear to me that ESS learning would greatly benefit from an approach that was centered on students' learning. After my first grueling experience of ESS teaching, during which I attempted to cover every topic I thought mattered in ESS, I started introducing in my ESS course what I called at the time a "Mini-Rio Summit". In this 2-day activity, students discussed and presented on topics of environment and development that had been highlighted at the Earth Summit in Rio (1992). Their contribution was from the perspective of a representative from a country they had selected as interesting to them. This format encouraged the expression of a variety of viewpoints and provided a more authentic experience. Through this group activity, I noticed how ALL my students became much more engaged in the class, performing extensive research on topics of relevance to their selected country, and displaying originality in their research approach and presentations. This gave me the idea that I should expand on this participatory approach and, unknowingly to me at the time, I started teaching a component of my Earth system science classes using the learner-centered approach. As time progressed it became clear to me that, when students are active participants, their learning is deep, enduring, and enjoyable. As I began to realize that many of LCE characteristics listed above directly map onto quality ESS instruction, I started integrating more and more of these characteristics in my classes.

Through teaching courses that address either the science of climate change or the policy associated with climate change, I have observed my students clearly and effectively constructing their knowledge by gathering and synthesizing information from lectures, books, articles, and from internet research. Two main challenges arose: 1) to guide students through integration of this complex and extensive information and, 2) to coach students through the assessment of information quality when obtained from the internet. The interdisciplinarity of ESS compounds the difficulties of the integration as it often requires input from many different fields. While my knowledge has broadened dramatically over the last 15 years, I have also learned to select the topics we cover in class so that they both provide a comprehensive view of the Earth as a system and are sufficiently familiar to me to teach them with ease. For topics I consider too far from my immediate knowledge (e.g., biochemical cycles) but require inclusion, I often invite guest speakers. This approach ensures that my students learn higher-level science, always drawing on principles and methodologies from the various ESS disciplines. For those topics in which I am marginally knowledgeable, (e.g., ocean thermohaline circulation and climate change), I learn them more in depth every time I teach my class and reflect on their connections with other aspects of ESS. The assessment of information quality represents a more difficult challenge. I address it through a type of cognitive apprenticeship approach that involves both providing general guidelines (e.g., try to assess the author's reputation, look for the presence and quality of the references), and demonstrating to the students, usually on an individual basis, how to proceed with the quality assessment. This aspect is still work in progress.