Case Study: Geology Department, Juniata College
Jump down to The Department * The Merger Process * Challenges Arising from the Merger * Benefits and Opportunities * Looking Forward
Context: The College
Causset College is a small, private, liberal arts college located in a rural setting. Situated on several hundred acres of land, approximately 1,600 students attend annually. The college graduates around 79% of its students, of whom 96% graduate within 4 years. A statewide decline in high school seniors has the potential to affect the college overall, including the Geology Department. In addition, the college is facing a budget shortfall, which has already had consequences for the Geology Department. The college once enjoyed research funding from a foundation but that funding stream is drying up, research across departments has been reduced, and scientists are competing for what remains. Administrative attention is currently focused on enrollment, which has increased, according to recent reports.
The Department: Geology, within Earth and Environmental Science
The Geology Department is half of the recently-formed Earth and Environmental Science Department. EES was formed by merging the Department of Environmental Science and Studies with Geology. The Geology Department is small, with 1 full professor, 1 associate professor and 1 assistant professor. The chair is contemplating retirement in 5 years but is likely to postpone this if he believes that the geology program would be endangered. The department offers a field-oriented undergraduate geology program: most courses include fieldwork, and geology majors take at least 10 field trips their first year. An off-campus field station complements the on-campus program. Professors emphasize the development of a well-defined set of skills in their courses. On the department website, the geology major is described as serving students who want a career as practicing geologists or who plan to attend graduate school. Majors may eventually earn state certification as professional geologists.
Over the past few years the faculty has involved an increasing number of geology students in independent research projects, and in presenting their research at poster sessions at annual meetings of the Geological Society of America. The geology faculty as a whole would like to mentor more upper-level students conducting research but do not receive teaching credit for supervising students and, therefore, would end up layering student mentoring on top of existing course loads.
The Merger Process
The Provost initiated a significant change in 2008 when he proposed a merger of the departments of Environmental Science and Studies and Geology, creating a new department of Earth and Environmental Science (EES) with a combined faculty of six. Although the Environmental Science and Studies Department was newer than the Geology Department, it had historically drawn more students. Initially the Provost proposed that the two departments "try" the merger. All faculty members saw benefits for students. Each department retained a chair and the budgets were separate, but the faculties met together regularly. At some point the university president announced that the merger "had happened." Since then the two departments have been merged administratively. Several factors led to the merger, including:
- During the 2002 external review reviewers commented on course redundancy and tensions between the two departments and suggested exploring increased cooperation between the two.
- The college enrollment office, hoping to increase enrollment, believed that they could more successfully market a combined department rather than two individual ones.
Challenges Arising from the Merger
The merger created some challenges related to the curricula. The chair of the Geology Department described key differences in the cultures and approaches of the two departments. Environmental Science is more hierarchical than Geology, with a menu-driven curriculum focusing on issues, projects and problems. The three faculty members work independently for the most part. The geology curriculum tends to focus on skill development in the labs and field training. The three faculty members often work and make decisions together together.
There are other challenges as well. The merged department offers as many distinct majors as it has faculty members (6). In addition, when the department tried to locate external reviewers from merged departments for the spring 2010 review, they found this difficult: "To be honest, very few mirrored our structure."
Benefits and Opportunities Arising from the Merger
Along with the challenges, the merger has come with benefits, including curricular changes and changing enrollment patterns.
- Increased cross-enrollment
The introductory physical geology course is now a required course for both the environmental science and environmental studies majors, which means that some students discover geology who might not otherwise have known it existed. Similarly, more of those students who identify themselves as ESS majors now take upper-level geology courses. While only geology students would have taken mineralogy in the past, this past spring the students were more diverse. - Adding new courses by eliminating course redundancy
The merger provided an opportunity for geology faculty to eliminate two courses that were also offered by environmental science faculty, and to replace them with two new courses. This is particularly significant in such a small department, where faculty cannot add a new course without deciding what they have to give up. The department was able to add courses focusing on climate change and on energy, minerals, and society. - Increasing departmental visibility on campus
The spring term course on climate past and present was team taught by a geology professor and a colleague in the political science department. Team-taught interdisciplinary courses are not new to the department, but the climate course is of current importance and of high interest, and comes at a time when it serves the department well. According to the geology chair,"This class is good for students and for us on campus.... [It will] morph into a team taught course that will meet one college requirement of an interdisciplinary colloquium. With attention to social and political aspects as well as science, that collaboration is really grand in other ways. It calls attention to an obvious aspect of climate that a class with a narrow scientific orientation would not address, in a way that has broader appeal to students. And it's also building bridges with other departments."
Looking Forward
The merger also presents the opportunity to re-evaluate the geology curriculum. Toward that end, the Juniata Geology Department hosted a Building Strong Geoscience Departments visiting workshop in February 2010 with a focus on curriculum and assessment. Discussions and activities that took place during that day illuminated several characteristics of the geology curriculum for the faculty. At the workshop, they
- articulated their program-level learning goals;
- developed a https://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/departments/degree_programs/matrix.html'matrix' of their courses and to what extent each addressed their program-level learning goals;
- studied their curriculum to assess whether or not it built skills progressively;
- looked for course redundancy; and
- checked to see if they were adequately addressing key concepts.
The workshop was an affirming event: the faculty realized that their curriculum was appropriate and oriented towards developing skills rather than facts. As a result, they identified items that should be addressed earlier in the curriculum. For example, the faculty realized that they should build students' math skills earlier in the program, more deliberately, and with more direct instruction. They came to the conclusion that their courses are adaptive, and that faculty members can easily add to or subtract material from them.
The faculty plan to continue using the matrix to evaluate their curriculum. They will continue to consider whether to add or collapse individual courses or experiences. In particular, they will re-examine the Introduction to Earth and Environmental Science course and compare it to the Introduction to Physical Geology course to see whether the geology course content needs adjusting.
Another outcome of the workshop is that the department established an alumni Facebook page, encouraging conversations/input about the geology curriculum. One alumnus responded that the geology program should consider adding a component that builds leadership skills, as these were important in his own job. According to the chair, the faculty had assumed that leadership developed automatically, and now realizes that this is not necessarily the case, and development of leadership skills may be built into their program.
Both the merger and the Building Strong Geoscience Departments visiting workshop have allowed the Juniata geology faculty to re-examine their curriculum and to refine it in ways that have been, and will be, beneficial for faculty and students alike. While not without challenges, the merger has led to increased enrollments in geology courses, exciting new course offerings, and improved visibility for the Geology Department on campus. The workshop further emphasized the flexibility of specific course content within a curriculum, illustrating ways for the department to refine their program without changing the course sequence.