Project Description

The On the Cutting Edge professional development program aims to improve the quality of undergraduate geoscience education through an integrated synergistic series of workshops and web-based resources. The program will enhance the participants' content knowledge in emerging fields and promote exemplary teaching practices; develop effective on-line resources to support existing workshops and provide widely accessible electronic versions of workshops to extend the influence of the workshops; and develop an active cohort of educators involved in further dissemination. The program is funded through five-year Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement - National Dissemination grants awarded by the National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education to each of the PIs.

The workshop program of at least six workshops a year includes workshops for early career faculty and for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, a course design workshop, three emerging theme workshops, and workshops at professional meetings. Workshops for early career faculty, workshops for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, and the course design workshop are envisioned as providing a regular mechanism to bring mature ideas on geoscience education and other topics essential to successful careers in geoscience education to all sectors of the geoscience community. These mature topics workshops are complemented by emerging theme workshops that are designed to move important new topics in geoscience research and pedagogical approaches from an initial stage of early activity by isolated leaders in the field toward widespread implementation in undergraduate geoscience courses. In all venues, workshop participants actively engage in discussions and activities that build on their current understanding, interact with experts and one another, and leave with resources and plans to incorporate new methodologies and/or content in their everyday teaching and/or plan how to move important topics into the larger geoscience education arena.

This program builds on the emerging opportunities of the Web to support workshop participants before, during, and after the workshop, and to bring the workshop experience to a larger audience. Each workshop has a virtual component that supports participants by providing information about the workshop, a resource collection relevant to the topic, and opportunities for on-line discussion with other participants and leaders. Following the workshop, web materials based on the workshop experience are created to enable on-line learning by a broader community and workshop discussion lists are opened to community participation to enable broader discussion of the workshop content. A major focus of the project is to experiment with a variety of approaches for capturing workshop content in forms that enable faculty around the country to engage in the workshop experience on-line.

One of the aims of this project is to expand the network of people who are willing and able to offer workshops and to assume leadership roles in creating future professional development opportunities. We will use workshops both to identify and to prepare new leaders to take effective and proactive roles in workshop development. Extensive pre-workshop discussions on workshop content as well as strategies to promote active engagement by participants help prepare the workshop presenters for their leadership roles. In selecting leaders for future workshops including on-line mentoring activities, we aim for a diverse leadership pool, including those from underrepresented groups, from a broad spectrum of geoscience specialties, and from a wide variety of academic settings.

The project includes a research and evaluation component aimed at two fundamental questions: 1) what is the current state of geoscience instruction; and 2) how can we design and deliver the most effective professional development experiences to enhance geoscience instruction. The project evaluator has developed an overall project evaluation plan that includes extensive evaluation of individual workshops (daily road-checks with daily reporting to workshop leaders, interviews with workshop participants during the workshop, and end-of workshop and longer term post-workshop evaluations by participants and leaders). To evaluate the current state of geoscience instruction, we are 1) developing a baseline survey of undergraduate geoscience education to determine how faculty are currently teaching their courses, how they gain information for teaching, and how they engage in scholarly work and 2) investigating how faculty do their work through interviews and diaries. An evaluation plan for the website is under development.

The project management team includes the PIs: Heather Macdonald (College of William and Mary), Cathy Manduca (Carleton College), Dave Mogk (Montana State University), and Barb Tewksbury (Hamilton College). Heather Macdonald is responsible for overall project coordination and administration, Cathy Manduca for the project website, David Mogk for development of resource collections, and Barb Tewksbury for print publicity. Each PI is responsible for one or more workshops a year: Heather Macdonald for the workshops for early career faculty and for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows; Cathy Manduca for one or more emerging topics workshops, David Mogk for one or more emerging topics workshops, and Barb Tewksbury for the course design workshop. Other key personnel include Sean Fox, Web Developer (Carleton College), Karin Kirk, Program Associate (Montana State University) and John McLaughlin, Project Evaluator. Web support for program administration includes a PI email list, document archive, master calendar, and calendar, application, and registration information for each workshop.