Chapter 5. How to Think Like a Geoscientist: Using ICE to Support Critical and Creative Inquiry
5.1 Instructional Context
John Johnston – University of Waterloo
Meagan Troop – Sheridan College
How might we encourage our students to think holistically? As an educator at the University of Waterloo, I’m always striving to purposefully integrate holistic approaches by creating an intentional interconnectedness between knowing, doing, and being into our courses and programs in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Delving deeper into a series of complex, future challenges with a holistic approach requires a sense-making process whereby students are encouraged to explore something that is new and personally meaningful to them in relation to the world around them.
For the earth science courses that I teach, I was looking for a learning and assessment framework that would encourage students to accomplish these aforementioned outcomes and to think like geoscientists by inspiring spatial, temporal, field, and systems thinking. Geoscientists all over the world apply this innovative thinking to tackle the most challenging problems facing society related to changing climate, threatening natural hazards, and dwindling energy, mineral, and water resources. One of the solutions that we came up with to encourage holistic approaches was to intentionally integrate the ICE framework into the design of a major cumulative assignment in the first time online offering of the Introductory Earth Sciences course. Applying the ICE framework facilitated a deeper learning experience for students as they explored their creative side and critically reflected on the quality of their work and their learning process.
The Earth 121 Introductory Earth Sciences course has been the gateway for geosciences at the University of Waterloo for more than 50 years. Classically taught in lectures since the 1960s, I started teaching the face-to-face version in the Fall 2014 semester with 300 students. In the Fall 2017 semester, I piloted my new online version of Earth Sciences with 100 students. Interestingly enough and quite unexpected, there were several students who preferred to take the course online rather than in the classroom as they were looking for flexibility and convenience. Both student interest and enrolment increased significantly after the first offering making the online version a sustainable option moving forward that would eventually replace the in-class version in the spring and complement the continued face-to-face offering in the fall semester until threatened by a global pandemic where the online class became the only option in fall 2020.
After teaching Introductory Earth classes for more than a decade at three universities as a contingent instructor, I embarked on a new journey to create my first online course with a team of experts (project manager, online learning consultant, digital media developer, and quality assurance specialist) at the Centre for Extended Learning at the University of Waterloo. The pedagogical design of the online experience was borne out of a series of critical, ongoing conversations over a period of a year and a half with the online learning consultant and co-author, Meagan Troop, and myself. This journey was incredibly challenging and time-consuming and it changed me personally and professionally. A major catalyst in this change process was the ICE framework as a means for supporting the alignment and articulation of my beliefs and values about Earth science education in practice and what I thought would best prepare students for professional geoscience practice.
The ICE model was applied as a conceptual framework in the design of the new online version of the Earth Science course. ICE offered a means to map and support the ways of thinking that would eventually underpin the entire online learning experience. More specifically, a major cumulative assignment in the course—the Study Site Assessment (SSA)—was designed with ICE in mind. The SSA encouraged creative compilations of student-selected sites and uniquely reasoned arguments that diverged away from point counting individual ideas to a more holistic and authentic assessment approach. The assignment also aligned with the concept of thinking like a geoscientist; that is, in ways that consider spatial, temporal, field, and systems thinking. Since many students are accustomed to regurgitating isolated, unconnected ideas, we strongly agreed that there was a need to disrupt the status quo through the design of the course. As such, we explored ways that ICE could both encourage and support connected ways of knowing given that the Earth System is complex, dynamic, and constantly evolving, which has historically been particularly challenging for first-year undergraduate students in the Earth Science course.
