Transformative experiences
How can a small liberal arts college remain small but seem so large at the same time? You make friends, share the work, and build alliances. COA has spent the last 50 years building alliances in and outside of Maine that benefit the entire COA and Mount Desert Island communities. We are small but we are not isolated. Since our founding, COA has hosted everything from the Maine Poets Festival to the International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology. Some COA students travel all over the world pursuing their educational goals while others take advantage of opportunities closer to home. The spirit of human ecology animates and connects all things at COA, and with each new incoming class the dynamic impact of new faces, new work, and new alliances grows exponentially.
Students describing the bedrock at Seawall, Acadia National Park.
“How do students learn geoscience?” asks Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Chair in Earth Systems and Geosciences Sarah Hall. Since arriving at COA in 2012, that question has been her primary focus. There is a whole field of study based on fostering transformative geoscience experiences in the field and the classroom, Hall notes. These experiences encourage students to think in different time and space scales and this, in turn, changes how they observe, learn, and think. In disciplines as varied as geology, music, puppetry, and prose, Hall has learned that students benefit from slowing down, looking around, and immersing themselves in what’s around them.
To encourage students to actively slow down, focus, and get their hands dirty, Hall takes her classes out into Acadia National Park to study the unique geography of Mount Desert Island. This sort of close-to-home fieldwork is part of the transformative experiences her students engage in at COA. The park, Hall says, provides an excellent environment for studying the processes that shape the earth, including glaciers, watersheds, active faulting, and climate change. Hall has found willing research partners at the MDI Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) and the University of Maine, Orono (UMO). “MDIBL does a lot of place-based watershed and public health research and UMO has a great group of people engaged in geomorphology and climate change research,” she says.
Hall and her geoscience students can often be found in locations around MDI monitoring streams and testing private well water for residents. “Jane Disney (associate professor of environmental health at MDIBL) already had the well water project running and I just called her up and asked if I could collaborate and use her program infrastructure,” says Hall. The project began with local school children in Maine and New Hampshire testing their wells. Hall extended the project to include the broader MDI community. “Then we just started testing people’s wells. We put calls out in the newspaper and on social media asking if people had wells that needed testing. Our research found that some island residents have elevated arsenic in their water.”
Despite the perks of being out in the field during most class periods, Hall says keeping students interested in environmental STEM careers is sometimes a tough sell. “A lot of the literature in my field points to the fact that people have a pretty narrow view of geology. Nobody says, I want my kid to grow up to be a geologist.” It’s ironic, Hall notes, that this same sort of thinking can be applied to the field of human ecology. If you are unfamiliar with the term you may think it applies to agriculture or biology when in reality it is a stance, a way of seeing the world and its interconnected systems.
Students in the Rocks and Minerals class explore the Bumpus pegmatite mine in southwestern Maine.
In 2014, Hall and two colleagues from the west coast received the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) grant: the GEOPaths IUSE grant. The IUSE grant is aimed toward developing programming to keep undergraduate students interested in STEM fields. According to the NSF website, the grant seeks to “improve the quality and effectiveness of undergraduate education in all STEM fields. IUSE investments enable NSF to lead national progress toward a diverse and innovative workforce and a STEM-literate public.”
The trio of professors combined their students to create a methods course in field-based research in California. They spent several weeks together studying botany, hydrology, geology, and geomorphology. “It was important for us that students learn methods relevant to those fields that would build employable skills for the future,” Hall says. It was also essential for the group to have students interact with stakeholders in the field. “These were people working in environmental STEM fields already who might hire students in the future,” she notes. Having stakeholders present for students to interact with was a key piece of the course. Students created career portfolios of the people they met with in order to see their career paths. “It was really interesting,” says Hall, “a lot of these professionals had radically different paths into geosciences, some were involved in international studies or dance or English literature… It shows students that no matter where you start educationally, you don’t have to remain fixed into that lane.”
Hall notes that most people working in geosciences need to be interdisciplinary thinkers because of the vast time and space scales over which many different processes are acting, whether those processes are related to people, plants, weather, orbital parameters, animals, or plate tectonics. When seen through this lens, interdisciplinary thinking just comes with the territory.
