In the last two posts, I’ve discussed the recent research that focuses on girls and science, and how teachers can make transformations in their practice to incorporate recent research.  Making a transformation in ones teaching is challenging and indeed a creative adventure.

In the 1970s I was teaching an undergraduate geology course at Georgia State University.  It was an introductory course in geology that included 20 students, many of whom were majoring in elementary teacher education.  The course content was fairly traditional, and was based on a popular introductory geology text.   In the midst of the course, I attended a conference in Boulder, Colorado for TA’s and college level geology teachers focusing on exploring new ways of teaching geology, and how to go about implementing these changes.  It was a powerful conference, and began in a “mission impossible” way.  A bus was waiting for attendees at the Denver International Airport.  We were directed to the bus, but it was evident that there was no convener or organizer present.  Instead, the bus driver turned on a tape recorder, and we listened to a voice telling us where we were going, and what was in store for us.  We were asked to write on in a notebook what our goals were for the conference, and what were our intentions.  Nothing else was mentioned until we arrived at the conference center, about 75 miles from the airport.

Clearly an adventure was in store for us.

Source: Hassard, Jack (1989). Adventures in Geology. Alexandria, VA: American Geological Institute

The conference was attended by nearly 50 Teaching Assistants (TAs) and geology professors, and was organized by The Earth Science Teacher Preparation Project (ESTPP), a consortium of colleges exploring ways to think differently about geology teaching. The ESTPP was funded by the National Science Foundation.  ESTPP was an outgrowth of the NSF curriculum project, The Earth Science Curriculum Project (ESCP) which developed inquiry-based teaching materials for the teaching of earth science in American schools during the 1960s and early 1970s.  ESCP was widely used in grades eight and nine, and influenced future courses and texts in earth science for years to come.

Most college-level science courses were taught in a fairly straight-forward way.  Two or three lectures a week and a double period for lab.  Lectures typically were presented by a professor of geology, and the labs were conducted by geology TAs.  The ESTPP was created to bring geologists (TAs and professors) from around the US together to explore new ways of teaching geology; in short to “think out-of-the-box.”

There were several people who organized the activities of the ESTPP from its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.  These included John Thompson, Bob Samples, John Carpenter, and Bill Romey.  Each of these persons was a creative thinker, and brought new ways to think about geology teaching to the field.  There were many others.

One of the leading theorists that influenced the group at Boulder was Carl Rogers, and his notion of person-centered learning.  Rogers, in one of his books, Freedom to Learn, explored a humanistic philosophy of teaching, and many of the people involved in the ESTPP worked to apply Rogers’ principles to the teaching of science, and to geology in particular.  I know of no other science discipline that worked deliberately to infuse inquiry and humanistic teaching into the content of its undergraduate courses.  Although this was not a wide-spread movement, the fact that it was funded by the NSF gave it great credibility.

Since I had been involved in the ESCP as director of summer institutes at Georgia State University, and had attended the ESCP Leadership Training Institute at the University of Maryland under the direction of Dr. Marjorie Gardner, I knew Bill Romey, Bob Samples, and John Thompson, and met John Carpenter in Boulder.

The conference in Boulder gave me ideas about humanistic and inquiry-based science teaching, and an opportunity to think about how I could apply these ideas to the course I was teaching in Atlanta.  I wanted to turn the curriculum over to the students, to make it more student-centered, and let them choose the content that they wanted to study (within the framework of geology).  I also wanted to use the ideas of Carl Rogers and in particular how I could re-create the course along the lines of a person-centered approach.

When I returned to Georgia State University, I met with the students and explained to them that I wanted to change the direction of the course, and I wanted them to help me make these changes.  We were only 1/3 of the way into the course, and had plenty of time to make changes and implement.  The students decided that they wanted to create individual plans and also wanted to be involved in as many “hands-on” activities as possible.  The activities that we had already done in the course were based on the approach that I had used in the ESCP Summer Institutes.  I met with students in small groups, based on the content they wanted to explore, and then I gave each team the resources they needed to do geology inquiry and many of these activities were those developed by ESCP, and located in their text, Investigating the Earth.  Although students developed individual plans, there was enough commonality to form teams of two or three students who could pool their ideas, and work together.

Students worked for a period of two weeks, at which time we held class meetings during which the small teams reported what they had done, and what they had learned.

Students felt a great deal of empowerment by being able to choose content, as well as search for activities that would help them learn.  They also found that working in partnerships or small groups enhanced their motivation, as well as their ability to think and “do” geology.

A year after this teaching experience, I moved to Florida State University and joined the Individual Science Curriculum Study (ISCS) and wrote the final version of one of the project’s ninth grade courses, Crusty Problems.  In 1988 I was invited by the American Geological Institute to present a seminar at the National Science Teachers Association annual meeting in St. Louis.  In preparation for the seminar I created a handbook for the participants, which was subsequently published by AGI entitled Adventures in Geology.  My initial transformative experience led to this little book, which is still in print.