Teaching and Learning Activities

Set-up or preliminaries, the main learning activities and the assignment task(s).

Our classes will begin with a “pre-test” in which we ask students “what is sustainability?” Students will do a 1-minute paper about their understanding of this topic. This will help us measure where students stand with respect to an issue they will be studying about in the class. During the next several months we will be doing a literature search for scientific articles (appropriate for the college learner) that students will begin reading. Activities in which students graph small data sets from the SOPS website will include a discussion of presentation of information to the general public and use of this information to make decisions (public policy decisions, local political issues, etc). Students will take a field trip to collect data; data collection will include surface temperature, turbidity and salinity. Students will reconcile their data with data collected by the Department of Ecology probe. Guest speakers (Dept of Ecology) will give students background on the marine ecosystem. Readings will include articles about ecosystem structure and function. Students will also examine recent weather events to determine any correlation between rainfall patterns and trends in the data. Students will use their data to build a STELLA model of the system interactions over the course of several quarters. Small data sets will be given to the statistics students to begin model construction. The end result will be a report, a poster presentation, and building a case study of the experience.