ACADEMIC STANDARDS COMMITTEE
Request For Foundations Credit Form
(10-22-09)
Please type your answers directly on this form. All of the information
noted below must be included in the request form. Failure to show how the
request for foundations credit directly addresses each of the three ECU
Foundations Goals for the course area may result in the request being
denied. ECU
Goals of the Liberal Arts Foundations Curriculum are available online at:
http://author.ecu.edu/cs-cad/fsonline/customcf/committee/as/liberalartsfoundation.htm.
A. Basics (for items 1-16, for cross-listed
courses provide two or more sets of information, as appropriate, under each
category)
1. Foundations Course Area (Arts,
Humanities, Basic Sciences, Basic Social Sciences, Health Promotion and Physical
Activity, Writing Competence, Mathematics Competence).
Basic Sciences
2. Unit in which the course will
be taught.
Geological Sciences
3. Unit
Administrator’s title, name and email.
Stephen Culver, Professor
culvers@ecu.edu
4. Course
Prefix, Number and Name.
GEOL 1800
5. Number of
credit hours.
4 credit hours
6. Prerequisites
(if applicable).
n/a
7. Course description as it will appear in
the catalog and a detailed course syllabus with a weekly schedule of topics to
be discussed which should reflect explicit coverage of each of the foundation
goals.
Course description exactly as it should appear in the next catalog:
|
1800. Geology of the National Parks (4) (FC:SC): Geologic evolution and scenic features in
our national park system. Topics include volcanoes, caverns, sea coasts,
glaciations, arid regions, and fault block mountains. Relationship of scenery
to geologic processes and materials. |
8. College
in which the course will be taught.
Thomas Harriot College of Arts and
Sciences
9. College
dean’s name and email.
Alan White, Dean
10. Date
approved by unit’s curriculum committee and chair’s initials.
8
January 2010
11. Date
approved by unit’s voting faculty.
8
January 2010
12. Date
reviewed by the unit’s chair and chair’s initials.
8
January 2010
13. Date approved by the college curriculum
committee and chair’s initials.
16
February 2010
14. Date
forwarded to Academic Standards.
26
February 2010
The purpose of the information provided below is to enable Academic
Standards Committee members to determine whether or not it is reasonable to
believe that the course named above will satisfy the three or four specific
goals for all courses in its area that are stated in ECU Goals of the Liberal Arts Foundations Curriculum are
available online at:
http://author.ecu.edu/cs-cad/fsonline/customcf/committee/as/liberalartsfoundation.htm.
B. Using the Foundations
Goals listed under the course’s area:
1. Describe in enough detail that it is
clear to the members of the AS committee how the course’s content will meet
Foundations Goal One for its area. List examples of required course textbooks
or other required materials that address the content described above.
Goal 1 states that “students will learn the subject matter of at least one core discipline in the Basic Sciences.”
Although it would be great fun to take a tour of all of the National Parks, ECU would not award Foundations credit for such a course – and rightfully so! Hence, students in this class will, instead, take a tour, not of parks but of a field of knowledge – in this case geology. Nevertheless, some of the best geological features of the world are enshrined in the U.S. national parks. So, this course will use national parks as illustrations of geological concepts and ideas, concentrating on those aspects of the National Parks that illustrate how the Earth works.
The course will help students understand that science works; that the Earth recycles everything slowly, by building and tearing down mountains; that the Earth's environment has been balanced for very long times; that human-induced changes are among the fastest Earth has ever experienced; and that the National Parks are critical but endangered living laboratories, museums, and repositories of biodiversity.
As illustrated by the syllabus, this course will cover the basic concepts and ideas of the broad field of geological sciences – from plate tectonics and mountains building, to sedimentary sequences and geologic time, to earth surface processes and the relationships between geology and life on Earth – using the National Parks as illustrations of those concepts and ideas.
The textbook, web materials, lectures, and virtual field trips will all emphasize the basic concepts and ideas of geological sciences, drawing specific examples from the relevant features in our National Parks.
2. Describe in enough detail that it is
clear to the members of the AS committee how the course’s content will meet
Foundations Goal Two for its area. List examples of required course textbooks
or other required materials that address the content described above.
Goal Two states that “students will learn the research methodology,
principles and concepts required to understand and conduct undergraduate-level
research in a basic science.”
As Isaac Asimov put it, “...
when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought
the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the
Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your
view is wronger than both of them put together.” (Isaac Asimov, The Relativity
of Wrong, Kensington Books, New York, 1996, p 226.)
(Note that the Earth bulges a little toward the
equator in response to the planet’s rotation.)
The first week of this course, before delving too much into the world of geological sciences or the geology of national parks, we will focus on the larger questions that directly addresses Foundations credit. What is science? Why pay for it? Why do it? Why trust it? Why learn it? Why bother? This first part of the course will introduce students to these questions and help them develop perspectives that will allow them to formulate their own answers. It will also briefly introduce students to the field of geology, giving them an overview of what this field is about, why it's important, and how it benefits society. Finally, this introduction to science as a way of thinking and working will serve as the entry point into the study of the environmental legacy that is our National Parks.
Students will be introduced (via in-class lecture, discussion, and examples) to the basic structure of science. In brief, they will learn that (1) science is a human social activity, but that it differs from many other human social activities in that the ideas of science must be tested against reality; (2) science enjoys a special place in society because science is so successful; (3) science shows which ideas are wrong, and also identifies ideas that scientists cannot disprove; (4) science keeps track of what works and what doesn’t work; (5) science is a meritocracy – good ideas tend to rise to the top (although it might take a while!), no matter who originated those ideas; and (6) science tests the structure of knowledge continually – a good scientist does not tiptoe around the tower of knowledge put up by earlier scientists, but tries to tear that tower down. Only those ideas sturdy enough to survive such attacks are saved, so the scientific edifice is exceptionally sturdy.
This will be followed by a brief discussion of the nature of the geological sciences and an introduction to the nature of scientific literature, which will serve as a means of reinforcing the discussion of the scientific method.
Excerpts from the article “Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to
Science” by Paul Bloom and
Deena Skolnick Weisberg (Science,
2007, v. 316, p. 996-997) will be used to construct a class exercise to
reinforce concepts regarding scientific thought and methodologies.
Of
course, students will have the opportunity to reinforce their understanding of
the scientific method throughout the semester.
As they examine the geology of individual National Parks, students will
be asked to identify the methodologies that were used to make the
interpretations presented in their text, in class, and on the various NPs web
pages. And, as a final exercise, each
student will prepare a brief geological report on a specific national
park. This report will include
observations (data) and interpretations of the geology of the park in
question. A core component of the report
will be a discussion of the methods used to reach the reported interpretations.
3. Describe in enough detail that it is
clear to the members of the AS committee how the course’s content will meet Foundations
Goal Three for its area. List examples of required course textbooks or other
required materials that address the content described above.
Goal 3 states that “students will learn about the discipline’s contribution to general knowledge.”
Geology,
broadly, is the study of the Earth. Geologists
and colleagues – geophysicists, geochemists, biogeochemists – study the sediments
and rocks that make up the Earth, the history of the Earth as recorded in those
sediments and rocks, and the processes that change those sediments and rocks. This includes oil and ores, landslides and
volcanoes, dinosaurs and meteorites, and much more.
Most geologists are involved
in one of four areas:
(1) finding valuable things in the Earth (gold and
silver, diamonds, oil, building stone, sand and gravel, clean water, and more);
(2) warning of geological hazards (volcanic
explosions, earthquakes, landslides, groundwater pollution, etc.);
(3) building an operator’s manual for the Earth
(Earth System Science); and
(4) informing/entertaining (What killed the
dinosaurs? How has the Earth changed over time?).
All
of these topics will be intricately interwoven into this course, as they are in
our National Parks, where humans and their environment interact daily – in
different ways, and with different consequences today than in the past. Indeed, it would be impossible to discuss
most of the topics listed in the syllabus without including considerations of
how humans interact with (and have an impact on) the Earth. This material will be interwoven throughout
the course – in the lectures, in the hands-on activities, and in the virtual
field trips. (see examples the end of
this document).
4. If the course area is Health Promotion
and Physical Activity or Writing Competency, describe the course’s content in
enough detail that it is clear to the members of the AS committee that the
course will meet Foundations Goal Four for its area. List examples of required
course textbooks or other required materials that address the content described
above.
n/a
C. The sample course syllabus should
contain a schedule outlining what will be taught when during the semester. Be
sure that the syllabus reflects coverage of areas included in Foundations Goals
1-3/4. Readings and assignments that meet the goals should be included in the
syllabus. If there is something not covered that provides evidence that the
course satisfies the foundations goals in its area (course pedagogy, etc.),
describe it here.
The textbook provides basic background on each park. Students will read the short chapters on
specific parks prior to the class session in which those parks will be used as
examples of specific geological processes or concepts. The
lectures, based on basic geological subject matter, will use specific parks as
examples of geological processes, methodologies, or products. The supplementary readings (e.g., the NPS web site readings), and
virtual field trips will help to illuminate the complexities of the Earth
system.
D. If it may not be clear to committee
members how your course materials address the foundations goals then bring
samples of course materials that will be used in the course that explicitly
address all of the foundation goals for the course’s area.
See example course materials at the end of this document
E. If the course is an upper-division
course (3xxx or 4xxx), briefly explain why students should get foundations
credit for taking the course.
n/a
EXAMPLE COURSE MATERIALS
For Goal #1 (basic subject matter of a core Basic Science discipline).
1. The following text will be distributed during the first week of class and used as the basis of a “small group discussion” activity about the nature of science, scientific thinking, and the scientific method.
For Goal #2 (the scientific method).
1. The following text will be distributed during the first week of class and used as the basis of a “small group discussion” activity about the nature of science, scientific thinking, and the scientific method.
Babies, Big Ben, and the Age of the Earth (R. Alley, Nov. 2009; used by permission)
In
this course, we will deal with a number of ideas—the age of the Earth, the
occurrence of evolution, the prospect of global warming, and others—about which
there are heated public debates in the US. These debates persist in the
US, and in some other places, long after scientists reached consensus and moved
on, using the science to help people. These debates persist here long
after most people in many other countries accepted the scientific results, and
began helping the scientists use the information to help people. Why is
this? Are scientists and people in some other countries just stupid,
ignoring common sense? Are many regular people in the US just
stupid? Are US politicians cynically exploiting subjects for personal
gain? You will get many different answers to these questions from
different people!
Here,
I’d like to give you something to think about. The discussion here in no
way proves that scientists are right about the age of the Earth, or evolution
or global warming—we’ll discuss the evidence about these later in the
course. But, the discussion here may help you to think about thinking
about these issues, and to examine your own ideas on the topics. So…
Have
you ever visited an old European city and tried to drive through the downtown?
Or have you watched from the sidewalk, or in a movie, while others tried to
drive the winding streets of Rome or London? People who have done so
quickly form opinions about the experience, and those opinions are very seldom
“Wow, what an efficiently designed road system, ideal for moving
traffic.” Far more common is “Wow, what a mess!” And yet, although
almost everyone knows that the roads are a mess in the downtowns of major old
cities, those roads are still there. Why?
The
answer is fairly simple. The roads were built when the city was tiny,
centuries or even millennia ago, to serve that proto-city. Then, as the
city grew, it grew around those roads. Buildings went up, and museums and
castles and theaters and sewers and all the other stuff of a city. Would
you move Big Ben, or tear down the Louvre and start over, to straighten out a
winding road? When faced with that choice, people usually keep the old
roads. Careful checking will show you that people actually have put a lot
of effort into improving the roads over time, moving things, tunneling under or
bridging over, adding subways to take off some of the strain, patching and
fixing and repairing, spending billions of dollars, but always starting from
the existing system rather than starting over.
There
is a useful analogy here in considering how humans learn things, and in
particular how we learn science. I’ve had the joy of watching closely as
our two daughters grew from babies to toddlers (and on to remarkable young
women), and many of you who read this either have closely observed growing
babies, or will. Scientists watch babies, too, and are learning all sorts
of things about learning.
By
the time a baby is a year old, he or she knows quite a lot about the
world. The baby knows that some things are inanimate and others
animate—rattles don’t walk away, but parents do. Many things are
predictable for a baby—a rattle released in midair always falls down, not up,
unless grabbed by a mother or father or other living thing. A rattle
placed properly on the railing of a crib will stay there.
In
gaining this knowledge, the baby is putting down “roads” in the brain, wiring
in information that later will be called “common sense”. When
artificial-intelligence researchers have tried to get computers to do human
jobs, perhaps the biggest difficulty has been that the computers lack this
“common sense”—teaching the computer all the things that a baby learns proves
to be quite difficult, because the baby learns so much.
Notice,
however, that this “common sense” is often not really correct. For
example, babies do not start off with a modern view of the shape of the Earth
and the physics of gravity. Whatever a baby does think, a “round, round
world”, with people and rattles pulled toward the center by the warping of
space-time by mass that causes gravity, is not in the original common-sense
picture.
Careful
studies show that, when children are finally told about gravity on the
spherical Earth, they initially resist the idea. They may deny it, or
they may try to modify it to fit with their “common sense”. (If asked to
draw the world, they may add a flat spot or divot just where they live in an
otherwise spherical Earth, or they may draw people living inside a
sphere.) Often, it takes until age nine or so before children really say
that they accept the idea that they are held to a spherical Earth by gravity,
and they draw the idea and work with it properly.
Furthermore,
studies find that children show this sort of resistance to most or all new
ideas that conflict with the “naïve physics” or “naïve psychology” formed in
the cradle. Like a city preserving its old roads, a child preserves the
initial ideas—perhaps adding or patching, building new paths in the “suburbs”
of the mind or building “subways” that take the new idea around the old one,
but getting rid of the old idea only when absolutely necessary.
Now,
almost all children eventually come to accept the spherical Earth. (There
actually are a few people out there who still argue against the spherical
Earth, but not very many.) But, typically all of the authority figures in
a child’s life agree in telling the child that the Earth is spherical—teachers,
parents, preachers, TV, books, and more—there is almost no disagreement.
(And yes, even young children have a ranking of reliability of information
sources, picking which “authority figures” to believe more.) Yet with all
of the authority figures agreeing, years may still be needed to convince a
child to replace the old “road” in the brain with a new one (and that old road
might even still be there somewhere).
What
about, say, the age of the Earth? The scientific evidence indicates that
the Earth formed about 4.6 billion years ago. But 4.6 billion years is
not “common sense” to most people—we don’t imagine such large numbers very
well. If you ask a very young child how old the Earth is, you are almost
guaranteed to get an answer that is not “4.6 billion years”.
In
many parts of the world, all of the authority figures in a child’s life agree
in telling a child that the Earth actually is 4.6 billion years old—teachers
and parents and preachers and politicians and more—and almost all children in
those places eventually come to believe that the Earth is 4.6 billion years
old. But in some places, including the USA, many authority figures do not
agree on this. Some preachers, some parents, some politicians and even a
few teachers express doubt about this scientific idea, and some may be actively
hostile to it, claiming a very different answer. When faced with a
scientific idea that runs against the “common sense” developed at a young age,
and with a split opinion among authority figures, a typical child will keep the
old “road” through the “city” of their mind. And that child is likely to
grow up into a parent, or preacher, or politician who disagrees with the
science.
As
noted above, this does not in any way prove that science is right and
young-Earth politicians are wrong, or that young-Earth politicians are right
and scientists are wrong. We’ll address those questions later, after
looking at how the Earth works. But, lots of evidence (and common sense!)
shows that people do arrive at ideas much as described here, and you can go
watch babies, visit other places, and convince yourself. (You might also
look at the article listed at the end of this text for a little more
information; some of the ideas and examples given here were taken from that
article, which provides additional insights.) So, when you visit Paris or
Madrid, please safely enjoy walking the narrow, winding streets. Then, on
the plane home, ask yourself what the “roads” look like in the mind of the
person in the seat next to yours—or in your seat.
Childhood
Origins of Adult Resistance to Science
Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg
Science, 2007, v. 316, p. 996-997
2. The following reading, which reinforces the nature of scientific method, will be distributed during the section on glaciers (Week 8)– after a brief discussion (with photographs and other supporting material) of the history of glaciations in Pennsylvania.
Perhaps more meaningful than the conclusion of past Pennsylvania permafrost is the underlying reasoning. Some people today, including important government officials, claim that “historical” geology is not really science, does not use the scientific method, does not produce scientific results, and so should be ignored.
But, consider how the process works. Go up to Bear Meadows, start up toward the ridge above, and look around carefully. You see that big rocks are present, of a type that is quite different from the bedrock directly beneath.
Many hypotheses are possible to explain this observation—space aliens dropped the big rocks; or bulldozers pushed the rocks into place; or, the rocks came screaming down from uphill in a giant landslide; or, they came creeping down slowly; or, … you could think of others. Each hypothesis leads to predictions. If a bulldozer pushed the big rocks in, we should find the bulldozer tracks, and we should be able to trace back in historical records to whom was driving the bulldozer, and why. The first settlers, who arrived before bulldozers were invented, should have found hillslopes free of big rocks. If the big rocks came from uphill, we should be able to find a source of such rocks uphill. Landslides start with big falls or slumps from particular places, so a landslide should have a big scar at its head, whereas creep slowly collects rocks as they are worked loose and carries them along, lining them up as they go.
So, you look for evidence that supports or refutes each of your hypotheses. The early settlers complained about the big rocks, old cabins are built on the big rocks, so the bulldozer hypothesis won’t work. There is no evidence for a landslide scar anywhere, despite evidence for lots of different “stripes” of big rocks extending downhill from a ridgetop source where bedrock of the same type as the big rocks sticks out. You quickly come to the realization that the rocks look like a soil-creep deposit from above; the predictions from each of your other hypotheses fail, but each of the predictions from the soil-creep hypothesis is supported by additional data that you collect for testing purposes.
Then, you note that the material is not now creeping—roads and trails are not being slowly buried by big rocks today, the trees are not knocked over, etc. Tree roots hold many of the rocks in place and prevent motion. So you look for a time in the past when tree roots were not holding the rocks in place. You collect more information—the big rocks are on top of smaller rocks and soil, not on the bottom, the big rocks are often standing on edge, the rocks show patterning of coarse and fine, etc. Other geologists are scanning the whole planet, laboring over centuries, and among the many things these geologists report are the conditions of creeping hillslopes in the tropics, the deserts, the temperate zones, and the poles. You talk to other geologists, devote a decade of your life to careful study, and eventually learn that the things you see on the slopes of the Seven Mountains resemble features of permafrost, and not features of any other modern setting.
But, if you are correct and these are permafrost features, there should be other evidence of cold conditions in the past, at the time that these features were active. So you take a core in the bog, and find that the bog started in a very cold time (the deepest pollen you find is from plants that today are found only on the tundra), and the bog seems to be dammed by one of the soil-flow lobes, linking the soil-flow lobes to the time of the tundra cold. (It is true that no one has used a backhoe to take the dam apart to look for a space-alien-constructed dilithium-crystal foundation, so maybe the space-alien hypothesis has not been completely falsified and the science could be improved; but, there comes a point of diminishing returns….)
Next, you ask whether this makes sense. You have tentatively concluded that the hillslopes of Pennsylvania record cold conditions at a particular time in the past. Is there a reason why cold should have been here at that time? Well, just to the north, glaciers were pushing up moraines at the same time. And astronomers making orbital calculations find that the high northern latitudes were receiving about 10% less sunshine than today during that glacial age. Climate modelers who test whether such a drop in sunshine would be sufficient to grow glaciers and make conditions very cold find that cold indeed makes sense, especially when the modelers include the effects of the drop in atmospheric CO2 levels that was triggered by the change in sunshine and that is recorded in ice-core bubbles from the time.
Now, a modern geologist who tells the “story” of ancient glaciations – Pennsylvania hikers twist their ankles on permafrost deposits – actually has a lot more evidence than the little sketch provided here. The libraries of information collected by centuries of Earth scientists are woven together in a sophisticated, carefully tested, highly reliable whole. This great tapestry of knowledge still has gaps, dropped stitches and moth-bitten places, and the ragged edge where knowledge runs out into the unknown that so excites us as scientists. But the science of the tapestry is well-woven and exceptionally strong. We can only hope that the misguided attacks on this science come from ignorance and not malice, because ignorance is more easily changed.
For Goal #3 (the discipline’s contribution to general knowledge).
1. An article entitled Taming the River to Let In the Sea – written by coastal geologist Shea Penland, Director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of New Orleans, published in Natural History Magazine, February 2oo5) – will be used to supplement our discussion of Groundwater and Rivers (weeks 6 and 7). This article, written in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, explores both the natural process in the Mississippi Delta region and the impact of humans on that system, pointing out that the major cause of flooding in southern Lousiana is not beach erosion or sea level rise, but flood control measures that have deprived of the river’s floodplain of sediment and accelerated subsidence of the delta plain.
2. Excerpts from the series of articles on global warming by Elizabeth Kolbert (The Climate of Man, The New Yorker, 2005) will help focus a class discussion of the scientific basis of global warming (focusing on the geologic record of past climate changes). The discussion will take place during week 14 (to supplement the discussion of Global Warming and the Future). Selected excerpts from this article will be distributed via blackboard and assigned as required reading one week prior to the discussion.
________________________________________________________________________
Please note that these reading are intentionally left out of the course syllabus. This is because, in order to keep the course up to date and of interest to the students, the instructor needs the flexibility to choose articles that are current and pertinent to the events of the day. The examples listed above are, however, typical of the types of supplemental material that are typically used in the course. In addition to these longer articles, newspaper articles highlighting current events (earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, flooding, tsunamis, etc.) will also be introduced into the class discussions. In this way, the students learn both the subject matter of the discipline and the relevance of that subject matter to humans.