An Illinois Sampler: Teaching and Research on the Prairie - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252080238 ISBN 13: 9780252080234

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

An Illinois Sampler presents personal accounts from faculty members at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other contributors about their research and how it enriches and energizes their teaching. Contributors from the humanities, engineering, social and natural sciences, and other disciplines explore how ideas, methods, and materials merge to lead their students down life-changing paths to creativity, discovery, and solutions. Faculty introduce their classes to work conducted from the Illinois prairie to Caribbean coral reefs to African farms, and from densely populated cities to dense computer coding. In so doing they generate an atmosphere where research, teaching, and learning thrive inside a feedback loop of education across disciplines.

Aimed at alumni and prospective students interested in the university's ongoing mission, as well as current faculty and students wishing to stay up to date on the work being done around them, An Illinois Sampler showcases the best, the most ambitious, and the most effective teaching practices developed and nurtured at one of the world's premier research universities.

Contributors are Nancy Abelmann, Flavia C. D. Andrade, Jayadev Athreya, Betty Jo Barrett, Thomas J. Bassett, Hugh Bishop, Antoinette Burton, Lauren A. Denofrio-Corrales, Lizanne DeStefano, Karen Flynn, Bruce W. Fouke, Rebecca Ginsburg, Julie Jordan Gunn, Geoffrey Herman, Laurie Johnson, Kyle T. Mays, Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, Audrey Petty, Anke Pinkert, Raymond Price, Luisa-Maria Rosu, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Carol Spindel, Mark D. Steinberg, William Sullivan, Richard I. Tapping, Bradley Tober, Agniezska Tuszynska, Bryan Wilcox, Kate Williams, Mary-Ann Winkelmes, and Yi Lu.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mary-Ann Winkelmes is Coordinator of Instructional Development and Research, Office of the Provost, and an affiliate scholar in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Senior Fellow at the Association of American Colleges and Universities. At the University of Illinois, she founded the Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education project. Antoinette Burton is a professor of history and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including A Primer for Teaching World History: Ten Design Principles.

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An Illinois Sampler

Teaching and Research on the Prairie

By Mary-Ann Winkelmes, Antoinette Burton, Kyle Mays

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-252-08023-4

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, vii, 
Mary-Ann Winkelmes and Antoinette Burton, "Introduction: Charting Common Ground in the Teaching-Research Nexus", ix, 
Bruce W. Fouke, "A Sense of the Earth", 1, 
Julie Jordan Gunn, "Collaborative Artists: How to Speak and Listen at the Same Time", 8, 
Nancy Abelmann, "The Intimate University: 'We Are All in This Together'", 14, 
Jayadev Athreya, "Painting with Numbers (and Shapes, and Symmetry)", 21, 
Lauren A. Denofrio-Corrales and Yi Lu, "From Desk to Bench: Linking Students' Interests to Science Curricula", 27, 
Flavia C. D. Andrade, "Bringing Statistics to Life", 34, 
D. Fairchild Ruggles, with Hugh Bishop, Rebecca Ginsburg, Audrey Petty, Anke Pinkert, and Agniezska Tuszynska, "The Humanity of Teaching: Reflections from the Education Justice Project", 40, 
Laurie Johnson, "Prairie Tales: The Life of the Lecture at Illinois", 49, 
Luisa-Maria Rosu, with Betty Jo Barrett, Bryan Wilcox, Geoffrey Herman, Raymond Price, and Lizanne DeStefano, "Engineering Professors Who Are Reengineering Their Courses: The iFoundry Perspective", 54, 
Karen Flynn, "It's More than a 'Ghetto Story': Using Dancehall as a Pedagogical Tool in the Classroom", 59, 
Mark D. Steinberg, "Experiencing Histories of the City", 67, 
William Sullivan, "More than Creativity: Infusing Research in the Design Studio", 72, 
Thomas J. Bassett, "The Maps on Our Backs", 79, 
Richard I. Tapping, "My Education as a Medical School Teacher", 87, 
Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, "Dance and the Alexander Technique: A Dynamic Research-Teaching Design", 93, 
Carol Spindel, "Five Things Only I Care About", 101, 
Bradley Tober, "Creative Code in the Design Classroom: Preparing Students for Contemporary Professional Practice", 107, 
Kate Williams, "Cybernavigating", 112, 
Kyle T. Mays, "Humanities and Sciences at Work: Liberatory Education for Millennials", 119, 
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS, 123, 

CHAPTER 1

A Sense of the Earth

Bruce W. Fouke
Departments of Geology and Microbiology
Institute for Genomic Biology

How did Life arise on Earth and is it elsewhere in the universe? What is the next source of sustainable energy? Will the emergence of infectious disease accompany global climate change? These are but a small sampling of the immensely challenging and complex scientific questions facing our society. However, no single branch of scientific research can provide meaningful answers. Earth scientists are therefore developing the new discipline of Systems Geobiology, which links multi-scale geological, biological, physical, and chemical processes. This systems geobiology emphasis necessitates the broad cross-disciplinary integration of reductionist and holistic approaches, integrated field and laboratory experimentation, and synthesis across broad spatial and temporal scales.

One of my objectives as a geoscience educator is to nurture a sense of the Earth in young natural scientists by regularly bringing them into the field. The field environment is the only educational setting where students witness firsthand the complexity and immensity of natural processes while simultaneously facing core human uncertainty regarding wilderness and the unknown. As a result, there is no substitute for educational experiences in the field, which uniquely meld science and humanity to provide the type of holistic integration needed to approach the most vexing issues facing our society. This is especially true for the earth sciences, where the goal is to reawaken the intimate primordial connection that all human beings have with their home planet. Yet because few have maintained the basic curiosity and inquisitiveness they had as children, many adults no longer seek to understand their own personal existence in the context of the historical evolution and modern-day composition of the Earth.

A cornerstone of effective field-based systems geobiology education is to emphasize that scientific endeavor is a distinctly human experience. This recognizes the power and importance of human observation, thought and emotional engagement during the ongoing scientific process of data collection and synthesis. From my perspective, this is also what makes science a populist endeavor (citizen scientists) rather than an activity available to only a few select people. Application of all the human senses and intellectual faculties, coupled with both the will and opportunity to learn about and understand one's surroundings, means that the capacity to conduct science is widely disseminated within our society. This is the fundamental transformation required for someone to become a citizen scientist of the world. Paramount among these capacities is the power of human observation and the need to return time and again to a complex natural system to simply observe and continually test previous ideas about how a natural system works. The formal progression along this field-based learning pathway begins with presentation of the age-old adage that "analogy identifies anomaly." In other words, the unknown (the anomaly) is identified as worthy of study and investigated via direct comparison to what the observer has previously known (the analogy). The most alluring and enthralling of natural environments are generally those that are the most different from what we have previously experienced in our lives. The unique size, shape, and color of natural wonders such as the Grand Canyon or Old Faithful make them irresistibly fascinating expressly because they are so foreign to our everyday experience.

The challenge lies in how to structure and deliver rigorous and memorable educational content while teaching systems geobiology in a wide variety of natural field environments. Obviously, no perfect solution exists for how to teach effectively in the field, the classroom, or the laboratory. Effective instruction is further complicated in higher education settings by the irony that the vast majority of university faculty members in the natural sciences have never received formal education in how to teach. Yet, intuition and commitment allow us to persist, and trial-and-error experimentation during my own twenty-five years of global field instruction has distilled the basic suite of teaching approaches presented in this chapter. These have proven to consistently and dramatically enrich the field-based learning experience of students of diverse backgrounds and nationalities in breathtaking natural environments around the world.

A further challenge for students is that real scientific inquiry does not follow the traditional scientific method—often first taught in middle school as a recipe-like mechanical series of events. In reality, when conducted rigorously and reproducibly, science generates as many new questions as it answers, a process I call scientific inquiry (figure 1). Stage 1 of scientific inquiry is initiation, where relevant and meaningful scientific questions are chosen and developed through the use of observation, intuition, knowledge from previous work (i.e., published studies and personal communications), personal observations, and thought experiments. Stage 2 is preexperimentation, where results from stage 1 are reworked into initial working hypotheses in the following ways: (1) by using logical thought...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252080238
• ISBN 13: 9780252080234
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 129
• Herausgeber: Winkelmes Mary-Ann, Burton Antoinette
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland