Coevolution of Life and Minerals Overcoming Disciplinary Boundaries

Co-evolution of Life and Minerals Overcoming Disciplinary Boundaries Penelope Boston Earth & Environmental Sciences Dept. NM Inst. Mining & Tech. Socorro, NM & Nat. Cave & Karst Res. Inst. Carlsbad, NM

Our Workshop Mission: …“better integrate hydrogeology, soils, biogeochemistry, and low-T geochem into undergraduate courses” You have to live it. You can’t fake it. Silicon Life – © Dickinson & Schaller

Heritage of Teaching Massively Interdisciplinary Stuff Seriously, it’s ALL that I teach… ² Spaceship Earth (Freshmen) ² Geobiology (Sophomore) ² Frontiers of Cave and Karst Systems (Senior & Grad) ² Astrobiology (Senior & Grad) ² Geomicrobiology (Senior, Grad, and Dist. Ed. ) They all involve systems, and I teach them that way. All involve the overlap between minerals and life.

Attitude Adjustments & Survival Strategies ² VERY flexible ideas about content (in spite of some tut-tutting by colleagues…) ² Facility with the material (Socratic Method) ² Multi-tasking ability very helpful ² Imagine you are still a Brownie Mom….

Not all your colleagues will welcome an interdisciplinary approach…

Challenges ² Extreme heterogeneity of student backgrounds ² Interdisciplinary classes attract such diversity ² Time devoted to bringing everybody up to speed on basics ² It is NOT time wasted ² Have them teach other across disciplines… ² Student fear, they all think they already should know stuff ² They have already hunkered down behind a smoke screen of “disciplinary helplessness” ² Geo & bio very terminology heavy ² Failure of imagination, both students and professor…

Tools ² Unifying intellectual framework ² Key paper or other resource ² e. g. Hazen 2010 (Evolution of Minerals, Sci. Am. ) ² Backed up by Hazen et al. 2008 (Mineral Evolution, Am. Mineralogist) ² Field trips are gold! ² Free-ranging in-class discussions ² Trying to help all the students feel competent in at least some area. ² Excess of opportunities to earn points (~120 -130% of an A) ² Plain speech when possible. ² Vocabulary lists, really! ² Demonstrate your own ignorance shamelessly! ² “Embrace your inner beginner!”