Teaching Philosophy

I am keen to teach students about the environment from high above in the atmosphere down into the deep earth with attention to the biosphere throughout.  During my career, I have taken every opportunity to involve students in my research, including coauthorship of a journal article.  Fortunately, the environmental problems I study are integral to the current interest in global warming.  Teaching and involving students with my research affords an unparalleled learning experience to both the students and me.

My teaching goals are first and foremost to ensure that the students learn the material, both the specifics of the subject and the general ideas and theories.  I know from experience that their being active in their learning is key.  Additionally I would like them to develop critical thinking skills to be able to interpret current events objectively.  They should be able to relate what they learn in the classroom to their natural environment outside the classroom.  It is important for students to understand the issue of scaling both in space and time.  I would also use every opportunity to enhance technical writing skills, oral presentations, and computational expertise.

A key goal is to design exercises to enable students to relate their everyday experiences to the theory they are learning in the classroom.  For example, in a meteorology course, students can develop a monthly weather notebook using data readily available over the internet or newspapers.  They can use their own creativity to relate theory to observations and improve their writing and computer skills.  Another example is to develop a field-oriented component of a terrestrial ecosystems or modeling course to enable students to measure changes in biomass, key carbon fluxes including photosynthesis and respiration, and leaf area index.  Using datasets from existing large-scale field experiments will enable students to scale from the stand to the region and will teach students the appropriate use of web-based datasets. 

I am currently teaching an undergraduate introductory geology course at Bristol Community College in New Bedford, MA.  I am running both the lecture and lab and have designed a syllabus to provide both the fundamentals of geology as well as some of the more exciting recent trends in the earth sciences (see attached syllabus).  A field trip will allow students to witness the results of the geological processes they are learning about in their local environment.  Lectures are interspersed with ample opportunity for discussion and feedback from the students.

Last January, I sponsored four Swarthmore externs for a week-long seminar in biofuels.  The seminar (see attached syllabus) involved cutting-edge research, while also providing simple computer modeling exercises to enable them to produce products.  They used the literature to develop model parameterizations for maize, soybean, and switchgrass, and then applied these results to simple model experiments to determine the carbon consequences of growing crops for biofuels in the U.S.

I am most excited about the opportunity to develop courses and teach undergraduate students within an environmental studies program.  Besides geology, I can teach a range of courses, including meteorology, paleoclimatology, remote sensing, climate modeling, ecosystems modeling, hydrology, or a general course on global change.  My teaching assistantships during graduate school included Meteorology, Sedimentology and Stratigraphy, and Introductory Geology.  In each of these courses I provided laboratory instruction, lecture and evaluation of student performance.  Environmental science integrates all of my areas of expertise, with particular relevancy to my current and past research.  I am eager to teach an environmental sciences course and have included a sample syllabus to illustrate some of my ideas.