Geoscience's seismic shift as fresh approach breathes life into discipline

GEOSCIENCE is among those disciplines that always have to argue their case, Ray Cas says.

It is not taught in schools, so first-year university students come to it as a requirement for their general science degree. Some take a shine to it and stay.

The opening of a new lab at Monash University has just given an almighty boost to the prospect of retaining those who come within the ambit of geology, geophysics and hydrogeology, the subjects collectively known as the geosciences.

The discipline's allure usually lies in fieldwork and the idea of one day working in remote and interesting locations, but in the university classroom chalk and talk have prevailed.

When Cas became head of school at Monash last year, he knew that to lift the quality of teaching and learning for undergraduates, he and his colleagues would have to aggressively pursue funding.

They were granted just under $1 million from the federal government's Learning and Teaching Performance Fund, the university and the department of science, and immediately set about changing things. They have created classes based around pods, benches and smartboards, a move aimed at increasing the relevance and appeal of the geosciences by making it possible to link it to events in (or under) the real world.

"All the teaching used to be done from the front of the classroom on a black board, a whiteboard or an overhead projector; everyone was focused on what was happening at the front of the classroom," Cas says of the old teaching model.

In the refurbished lab, groups of up to 10 students will work atgranite, sandstone, dolorite and other stone benchtops, using computers and smartboards to siphon information from websites such as those run by the Smithsonian Institution or the US Geological Survey.

"For example, if we are working on plate tectonics, one group might identify where in the last hour, or four hours, or 24 hours there have been earthquakes, another might look at volcanic eruptions, and where these occurred in relation to the plates," Cas says.

"It's almost real-time access, and we can monitor webcams at the sites of activity, too."

In another example, Google Earth will be used to monitor sedimentary zones such as riverbeds, or deserts or continental shorelines.

For Cas, the teaching ticks the pedagogical boxes of immediacy and flexibility. Work from one group can be scaled up and screened around the room so all 70 students can benefit.

Monash's geosciences school is the largest in the country and has more than 300 students across three years.

For Cas, it is gratifying that numbers are building, despite the closure of 10 geosciences programs in universities in 15 years to 2007 and the underfunding endemic in the Howard years.

Before the global financial crisis, geosciences students who completed their honours years at Monash, as two-thirds of third-years do, were partly attracted by the high starting salary, which was about $90,000.

Cas estimates that post-crisis, this is about $60,000, still a respectable figure, and concedes not all of this year's graduates can expect to find jobs immediately. But he predicts resources will be one of the economic sectors first out of the downturn.
17/07/2009