1.  Instructor:

 

Robert M. Thorson

 

Professor of Geology

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Department of Anthropology

 

 

 2.  Email Contact

 

Robert.thorson@uconn.edu

 

 

 3.  Proposal Title:

 

Science from Social Science …or… Geology from History :  A Seminar-discussion, Group 3 Course for the Honors Program.

 

Proposed by the instructor in collaboration with, and at the invitation of the Uconn Honors Program.

 

 

 4.  Work to be Done During Grant Period

 

What I have now is little more than a notion that great books can both introduce and extend a great geology textbook.  What I propose to do is to read, read, and read, then develop a list of texts, discussion modules, internet modules, and pedagogical techniques for use with a small (ca. 20) highly motivated group of self-selected students.

 

 5 & 6.   A general statement of how this fits into the Gen Ed requirements and how it will enhance current course offerings.

 

Horse of a Different Color

 

This course will fit into the gen-ed structure by offering a stand alone alternative to the typical Gen-Ed honors course, which is an enhanced variant of a pre-existing course for all students.  Rather than start with a course, subject, or professor, we propose to start with the honors students themselves, asking: “How can they be honored and satisfy their gen-ed requirement simultaneously?”  The answer is: “Honor them with the personal attention of a senior faculty member in a small course designed for their special needs.”   With respect to honors programs in general, this is where the proverbial rubber meets the road.  Everything else is important, but less so.

 

 

Carrot and Stick

 

Having answered this question to my satisfaction several years ago (while an invited candidate for Honors Program Director), the dissolution of the Department of Geology and Geophysics now provides me the opportunity to make a fresh start with new endeavors.  The convergence of our department’s breakup and the creation of the GEOC competition, presents an opportunity for me to stick my neck out to reach the carrot of start-up funding, in an attempt to engage a bright group of beginning undergraduates, following a formula used by my academic colleagues at Colby, Middlebury, Bates, and Williams Colleges.  No slackers will be allowed; including myself.

 

Having just re-designed the Gen-Ed geology curriculum (with Jean Crespi, Ray Joesten, and Tony Philpotts) with our Earth and Life Through Time initiative (Geol 103, 105, 107, 109, 113), we now have a modern lecture and lecture/lab version of beginning geology for the mass college audience.  Ever ready for new challenges, now is the time for me to work on a genuine honors model for the same subject. 

 

 

Sample Content

 

Though the course would teach the students about glaciers, coasts, rivers, and volcanic processes, it would do so, indirectly.  We would start with “second-floor” subjects already of compelling interest to the serious student such as the California Gold Rush of 1849, Colonial Slavery, Transcendentalism, Moby Dick, and the Battle of Bunker Hill.  I would then take each student on a quick tour of the “first-floor” where geography lies, then go down to the basement of geology where we would spend most of our time.  Beneath regional culture is physical geography, the offspring of geology.

 

  • They will learn why the America’s first European residents at Jamestown Virginia  failed to find gold, and why those at Sutter’s Mill, California did. This is a story of hydrothermal mineralization, the chemical weathering in soils, and the hydraulics of stream flow.

 

  • They will learn why the slave-plantation system worked so well (from the point of view of those who were not enslaved) in tidewater, Virginia, but not in the north.  Though cultural factors are compelling to most interpreters, to my mind as a geologist, this is also about the control of space, which is really about the development of a low-gradient micro tidal coastal plain on America’s passive tectonic margin.  Plantation “overseerers” could oversee rather well in a country without hills.

 

  • Then there is coal, and its distant remove from its distant geological cousin, iron ore.  Great Lakes Industry results from many things, chief among them is glaciation.  This ice sheet stripped away the overburden strata from northern Michigan Wisconsin, and Minnesota, exposing the truly ancient iron ores of what amounts to a national basement.  Drainage from the ice exposed the merely old coalfields of the Appalachian Plateau, while simultaneously creating a transportation corridor of river and rail.  Pittsburg simply had to happen. 

 

  • The battle of Bunker Hill was fought on Breed’s Hill, with the “grain” and shape of the glacially streamlined hill setting the stage. 

 

  • On, and on, and on…

 

 

For example,

  • Ethan Frome is a climatological story. 
  • Moby Dick is really about the security offered by New Bedford’s deeply gashed, granite coast. 
  • Huckleberry Finn needed the “strong brown god” called Old Man River just as surely as Tom Sawyer needed Injun Cave, a karst cavern.  
  • Laura Ingalls Wilder (and Ole Rolvaag) wrote about the prairie grasslands, which are also about the alluvial veneer on top of an old, dinosaurian bone-bearing foreland basin, created by the weight of the growing Rocky Mountains to the west, later destined to become the Great Plains. 
  • Paul Bunyan’s Babe the Blue Ox didn’t stomp out Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes (there are actually more); it was the chaos of ice stagnation, which was, in turn, caused by the well-drained bed of the glacier and its low slope on the three-way drainage divide between the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, and the Red River of the North, which drains to Hudson’s Bay. 
  • Hawaii is, and always was, about geology, simply because it is too young to have much else, except for o the recent exotica of island biogeography.      

 

Pedagogy

 

The idea is to get the students to read real stuff, the primary literature, much of which they experienced earlier in their education in one form or another.  Then…to take that education and broaden it…deepen it…to add real science, really “hard” science, to that which they already know, or think they know.  Such a course would not be for the fainthearted student.  It would be torture for any but UConn’s best.

 

But it would never be torture for our best.  We would help student reach this challenge by providing tutors.  Students will be expected to read and understand whatever geology textbook is being used in the Earth and Life Through Time sequence, which will be taught during at least two different time blocks each semester.  I will spend at least part of each class period making sure it was read and understood.  They will also be encouraged to sit in on the Earth and Life Through Time lectures, on a space available basis, of course.   We will figure this out later.

 

 

 7.  Evaluation of Project Objectives.

 

Yikes?   A mixture.  I would invite anyone -- honors director, advisors, administrators, hired consultants from the best teaching schools -- to help evaluate and guide the pilot testing of this course.  Student satisfaction, however, will be solicited frequently, and will be of paramount importance.  I can take the criticism.  Newspaper columnists are used to it.

 

 

 8. Name of Program Director

 

Dr. Lynne Goodstein, Vice Provost.

 

Note:  Dr. Thorson will be developing courses to be cross-listed in the new geoscience entity (GEOS), Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), and Anthropology (ANTH).  This course would be part of his contribution to Gen Ed GEOS courses, which is expected to be one third of his load, at least for the next few years. 

 

 

Attachments: 

 

1.   Cover and Copyright Page for “Coal: A Human History” by Barbara Freese, the kind of book I would use to teach Geology, being inexpensive, scholarly, and written for the intelligencia (not catering to the student market).

 

2.   Cover and contents for Essentials of Geology,” the text we would use as background, as a means to an end, not as an end.

 

 

3.   Justification for explaining why this course meets the standards for a GEOC science course (originally developed for the Earth and Life Through Time proposal).

 

4.   Letter from Lynne Goodstein.