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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: 978-0-252-09657-0
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 experiments (i.e., dialectical and methodological skepticism approaches); (2) by applying integrated modeling approaches; (3) by making reasonable estimates; (4) by using analogy with known phenomena to identify phenomenological anomalies that are not yet understood; and (5) by being willing either to support or to reject basic conventional thinking. Stage 3 is pilot experimentation, in which pilot study experiments are designed and implemented in the field and in the laboratory. These pilot studies receive feedback from simultaneous theoretical modeling efforts. Once the pilot data from stage 3 have justified the experimental design and proposed hypothesis testing, then full experimentation is completed in stage 4, in which newly produced data are immediately modeled to test the targeted hypotheses. Stage 5 is a post-experimentation phase of thorough synthesis, evaluation, and modeling of the completed experimental data set to interpret interactive geological and biological relationships. And finally, reiteration and reinitiation constitute stage 6 of the scientific inquiry process, wherein scientific inquiry is embarked on anew with refined questions and hypotheses that can be pursued in the next full cycle.
Like researchers, students in the field are immediately confronted by the coupled challenges posed by scale and complexity. So that students can address and incorporate these factors, the primary physical, chemical, and biological components of systems geobiology can be placed into a "Powers of Ten" spatial and temporal framework. For example, most natural environmental systems span a dynamic length-scale spatial range from 10-9 to 105 m. This illustrates for students that analyses ranging from the single cell to entire ecosystems can be simultaneously measured, correlated, and mechanistically linked with geological processes.
Another remarkably important and helpful tool for students engaged in field-based education and research is the field notebook. The bright cover and thickly woven wood fiber and cotton pages of field notebooks allow them to be submerged in water, lost in forest, dropped in caves, and buried in snow, but eventually retrieved without being destroyed by the elements. Field notebooks can survive virtually every terrestrial or submarine calamity, with the possible exceptions of fire and theft. I encourage students to record their entire field experience of thought, observations, data collection, and emotion in their field notebooks. Doing so can help students recognize that measurements made on a warm and sunny spring day can have a fundamentally different level of reproducibility than those taken in freezing, windblown sleet in early winter. Furthermore, thorough preparation and organization is required to conduct a successful field campaign. The field notebook is at the heart of this preparation, serving to coordinate electronic digital photography, data collection, and careful personal observation. Each page of the field notebook should be digitally photographed as it is completed, and then stored as backup copies each evening as the student summarizes and checks the notes. The field notebook further acts as a comprehensive diary, in which ideas, conversations, contacts, and memorable experiences are recorded. Interleaving words, phrases, and songs from foreign languages of the countries where they are studying with their scientific work is an essential means by which students reconstruct the details of their fieldwork when they are back in the university classroom and laboratory.
These approaches demonstrate, in the context of the field, that a dynamic synergy exists between geoscience education and systems geobiology research. This serves to illustrate at the onset that teaching and research are synchronized and inextricably linked efforts. Further, the field is an extremely well-suited venue to show that both teaching and research are required to enhance society through a better understanding of complex global feedback interactions between the geosphere and biosphere. In addition, the entire life-Earth system evolved prior to and independent of the establishment of political borders, making earth science a fundamentally international activity. The international global stage plays out through integrated learning experiences in classrooms, laboratories, and field sites around the world, where ongoing experimentation in nature demands that students use cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural scientific approaches. This in turn places students in fascinating yet totally unfamiliar natural environments. This holistically encourages the evaluation and application of "analogy identifies anomaly," in which students are required to regard the natural world through the objective lens of international perspectives. The field-based viewpoint thus creates cross-disciplinary learning environments that reflect scientific and cultural diversity, all within the framework of global earth science education.
I first began teaching classes in the field when I was in graduate school, where I led departmental courses to sites in the Caribbean in which I was conducting my dissertation research. This continued during my postdoctoral years, where the opportunities for integrated field instruction expanded to sites across North and South America, Europe, North Africa, Russia, and Ukraine. The central importance of extensive planning for the field, coupled with the need for constant strategic flexibility, proved especially vital on many occasions when bringing Dutch, Russian, and U.S. students on trips to the Crimean peninsula and the Austrian, French, and Italian Alps. Since I became a faculty member at the University of Illinois, the opportunity to offer field courses in these locations has continued and further expanded to include the Arctic. Throughout, I have observed how geology and the natural environment play central roles in all cultures, ethnic backgrounds, and nationalities. Thus, these experiences have been critical in the ongoing evolution of my own teaching approaches and made me acutely aware of the sensitive cultural and philosophical issues confronting the natural sciences and our global civilization as a whole.
I annually take students to Curasao coral reefs (fig. 2) and Yellowstone hot springs. Students initially develop a detailed working knowledge about these sites during a semester of classroom lectures and laboratory experiments, which culminates with a capstone field experience. In the Curasao course we stay at and work out of the Caribbean Research and Management of Biodiversity Institute (Carmabi). Here students utilize SCUBA and snorkel techniques to examine the modern coral reef tract underwater, comparing its ecosystem diversity, sedimentology, and chemistry with 16 million-year-old Miocene reef counterparts fossilized in the mountains along the leeward coast of the island. In Yellowstone, students learn winter mountaineering skills to conduct hands-on experiments in the field to test hypotheses they have formulated during the semester regarding the influence of heat-loving microbes on mineral precipitation.
The following quotation is from the field notebook of a student on one of the Curasao coral reef trips. The notebook entry dramatically illustrates how students gain in-depth scientific knowledge while fully experiencing and connecting with the sublime natural environment in which they are working. These students have learned not only how to make and record scientific observations, but also how to integrate this knowledge with their own human experience and then transform that vision into words.
The crystal clear jet black night sky had unveiled itself to us as a galactic roadmap of infinite proportions. We were now humbled before the magnitude of the celestial unknown, somewhat safe on a limestone precipice that is periodically shuddered by the impact of rolling surf. As if collectively enthralled by an ancient shared dream, we came to understand this place as the helm of a great ship called Earth, hurdling us forward on a journey that was billions of years in the making. The rocks comprising our current vantage point had come into existence many tens of millions of years ago as deep-water spreading center seafloor basalts in the southern Pacific Ocean. Tectonic forces then wrenched these deposits thousands of kilometers to the east, dragging them along the jagged northern margin of the South American plate. In the process, the rocks beneath our feet were uplifted more than half a kilometer, raising them from the permanent darkness of the deep oceanic abyss to the shallow seawater zone of sunlight penetration. Here, coral reefs would thrive for tens of millions of years and the present island of Curasao would come into existence as part of the Lesser Antilles. As tectonic forces continued to uplift the island, sea level was independently driven up and down hundreds of meters as ice age glaciers on far away high-latitude continents waxed and waned. The combination of these multiple geological and biological processes created the coral reef limestone cliffs from which our view of the Caribbean sky show was now being witnessed. We now also see the same coastal marine environments in which we have been SCUBA diving earlier today, which allowed us to study the living reefs of this island.
The future of cross-disciplinary science demands that we train students to address the complex global environmental issues facing our society. An essential means to attain this goal is to ensure that at least some portion of their scientific education takes place in natural environmental settings. Field-based education gives students the experience of observing, documenting, and tracking natural processes, which develops their capacity for scientific inquiry while simultaneously fully engaging their senses and emotional intellect to develop a deeply personal sense of the Earth. Provided with these perspectives, future natural scientists will be delighted, surprised, informed, and ultimately educated by the environment itself each and every time that they step into a new natural surrounding.
CHAPTER 2
Collaborative Artists
How to Speak and Listen at the Same Time
Julie Jordan Gunn
School of Music
I am a musician, a collaborative pianist, someone who most enjoys the creative process of working and performing with others—singers, instrumentalists, composers, poets, dancers, and actors. For me, the challenge of being creative is best met as a team. I don't believe in the myth of the lone artist. Most of my growth, and most of my students' growth, has been through collaboration.
To understand my own artistic development, I think of the performing that meant the most to me. My main professional partner is also my husband, Nathan Gunn; while we have both collaborated with others in recital, our principal work is as a pair.
Our New York recital debut was at Weill Hall, with Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin. This traditional recital offered a series of songs by the acknowledged father of German lieder. This recital demonstrated that we had become quite competent, but we weren't yet creative. We weren't yet able to perform from our unique points of view.
Having made the big debut, we made progress quickly, in the form of a recital of American songs ranging from folk songs to high art, arranged to tell the story of a man's life. American singers and pianists have been presenting American songs at the end of recitals for generations, but for this particular recital we introduced a slight innovation by disregarding the boundaries of genre, for example, by treating a pop song as if it had the same potential as an art song to convey a man's experience.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from An Illinois Sampler by Mary-Ann Winkelmes, Antoinette Burton, Kyle Mays. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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