Gigi Richard: Using in GEOL 196 Topics: The Future of Food at Colorado Mesa University

Course Overview - first day of class: I created a short PowerPoint presentation to introduce the structure of the course. Also, I created a handout summarizing the weekly schedule and the weekly assignments. The students were less intimidated than I expected and pretty excited. I asked students to say what their favorite food was when I called roll. There were lots of meat eaters. They enjoyed talking about their favorite foods and it provoked some fun class interactions.

Module 1 - Introduction: Students hadn't done the pre-class reading and struggled with the idea of a concept map and with the CHNS diagram, but the case students were great. Need to spend more time explaining these and perhaps provide some examples to get them started. Otherwise the module was appropriate for the time allotted and all groups made good progress on their diagrams. I created a new handout for the summative to more clearly explain what to do.

Module 2 - History of Food: Introduction to the Capstone project and other course logistics took too much time in class. I also spent quite a bit of time in a class discussion about the pre-class reading, including the following topics: domestication, fire, Jared Diamond's article about agriculture being a mistake, and positive/negative feedbacks. Several students struggled with the feedback concept, and I would take more time on this in the future. I would also spend more time offering examples of how to populate the CHNS diagrams.

The summative assessment for this module is pretty complicated, and needs a good bit of introduction, which I rushed through. Once they were in groups and working on the assignment, there were a lot of questions, which I should have answered in the introduction, but instead I spent a lot of time going from group to group, explaining the same thing over and over again.

Module 3 - Diet and Nutrition: For the pilot, this module was at the very end of the semester. It was one of my students' favorite modules, perhaps because it's something they can relate to. They learn a lot about different foods and nutrients in foods. It provoked some great classroom discussion. I think it would be more appropriate to include it at the beginning of the semester to help provide context and relevance for the rest of the course. I created a PowerPoint for this module to guide classroom discussion.

Module 4 - Food and Water: Students didn't seem to have an trouble with this module other than that they felt that it was a high volume of work. They did struggle with the concept of a watershed, and I would spend more time making sure that concept is clear. I created a PowerPoint for this module to guide class discussion.

Module 5 - Soils and Nutrients: This module is one of the most challenging of the semester because the concepts are pretty foreign to most non-science majors. Most students have not really thought much about soil, so it's also one of the most eye-opening modules of the course. The summative assessment is challenging, but rewarding as I think it tells an important story in how nutrient applications vary significantly between industrial US farms and subsistence farms in developing countries. We spent quite a bit of time in class discussing the concepts from the pre-class reading.

Module 6 - Crops: This is another module that is particularly engaging for the students. They begin to see connections between the past two modules and why certain crops are grown where they are grown. In addition, they see how just a few crops make up the majority of our global agricultural commodities. The commodity data were particularly eye opening. I created a PowerPoint to help them with understanding the different responses of C3 vs C4 plants.

Module 7 - Soils and Crop Management: I created a PowerPoint with quiz questions embedded in it help cover the material from the voluminous pre-class reading. It was a lot of material to cover and a lot of really new concepts and terminology for the students. The summative assignment is a great exercise using real data from a study about different crop management strategies.

Module 8 - Pests and IPM: This module included a great deal of complex material, particularly for students who have had previous exposure to ecology. I created a PowerPoint with embedded quiz questions to help with their understanding of the pre-class material. The summative included a lot of data, which I synthesized a bit for my students. I also revised the handout for the summative for my class in an attempt to simplify things.

Module 9 - Climate Change: Students struggled with understanding the maps in the National Climate Change Viewer. The summative assessment involved working on their capstone project, which was a welcome break.

Module 10 - Food Systems: This module dives into some concepts that felt more comfortable for some students. Again, I created a PowerPoint to help guide the class discussion and to help clarify the important concepts from the pre-class reading. Students found the summative assessment really confusing if they hadn't paid attention to my introduction or if they didn't read the instructions, but the take-home message from the activity is great.

Module 11 - Human-Environment Interactions: This module brings everything together and has students considering how what they've learned through the semester contributes (or not) to the resilience, adaptive capacity and vulnerability of the food systems in different regions. I created a PowerPoint for this module and added in a local food desert example that helped to bring that concept home for some students. I think the students had a bit of trouble relating to the famine exercise in the summative. This is a very important module for the capstone project.

Module 12 - Capstone Project: The capstone project was particularly challenging for students studying regions outside of the US. Data are more readily available for the US. I had two groups of students working on regions in Peru, so I had a colleague from Peru come talk to my class one day. He shared quite a bit about the culture, climate, landscape, and food of different regions and that helped those students groups have a better feel for their regions.