HR: 09:00h
AN: ED31E-05 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Alliances With the Potential to Transform Geoscience Education
AU: * Barron, E J
EM: barron@ems.psu.edu
AF: The Pennsylvania State University, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences 116 Deike Building, University Park, PA 16802 United States
AB: Geoscience problems and disciplines are inherently global, and today's opportunities for students to join the workforce also increasingly involve every country and every place on the planet. We have reached the point where the need to create global educational experiences and to make global connections are more important than ever. First, there is enormous benefit to all students if they can contribute within the context of an increasingly globalized world. Second, our primary objective as educators is to build human capacity. The reach and impact of any university is severely limited if our efforts to build this capacity is limited to students within our own classroom. The Alliances that have the potential to transform Geoscience education then have two pathways. The first is to internationalize the curriculum and to provide international educational and research opportunities. This includes: (1) establishing formal undergraduate exchange opportunities specially for the Geosciences, (2) providing opportunities within our course frameworks to enable students to gain international competences, (3) promoting international field experiences and research projects, (4) developing collaborative educational projects with international partners, and (5) creating institutional structures that are charged with promoting, proposing, reviewing, monitoring and assessing international opportunities. The second is to recognize that developing strong educational programs across the world will have a greater impact on education and research, and hence the global workforce, then for select countries to educate small populations of international students. The Alliance for Earth Science, Engineering and Development in Africa (AESEDA), created at Penn State in 2003, is establishing the partnerships with universities in Africa and with HCBUs within the U.S. that both internationalize the education of Penn State students and enable capacity building within the participating universities. AESEDA creates (1) research opportunities that attract students and promote partnerships and therefore yield strong educational outcomes, (2) collaborative teaching opportunities among universities, based on faculty exchange designed to co-develop curricula and classroom materials and that allow shared teaching experiences (video, on-line, exchanges, etc), and (3) the integration of physical sciences, engineering and the social sciences to address critical societal issues, again serving as a powerful attractor for student interest. In doing so, AESEDA serves both to internationalize a U.S. educational experience and to create educational capacity building in other universities.
UR: http://www.aeseda.psu.edu/
DE: 0810 Post-secondary education
DE: 0850 Geoscience education research
DE: 0855 Diversity
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005