IBL for Geography is best done in the field: Fact!
I have just got back from a three week trip to California, where I had the most amazing time and learnt so much more than I thought I would. The trip was part of the 3rd year Geography Undergraduate module ‘Dryland Environments’ and we were whisked off straight from Sheffield to the Mojave desert , via two fights a whole lot of coach journeys. The trip itself accounts for 30% of our module mark, as we were required to give a presentation at the end of the trip on our project, which we had been designing in small groups 5 weeks prior to our arrival. However, it wasn’t all just about out presentation and our projects, we were taught some amazing things in a rather amazing way. You guessed it. IBL.
Here is just one example…
One morning, we were driven out to a place called Soldier Mountain and divided up into our project groups. The landscape around us was like nothing we had seen before (except perhaps in text books and journals). The floor was crusted and cracking, yet had a huge pond of mud in the middle. There were verticle walls of sediment with randomly sorted rocks inbedded in it but yet striations of big rocks. It was a confusing mess. Our lecturers gave us one hour to decide what was going on in the landscape, come up with a story, and then go and tell them about it to see if we were right. So we all wandered off in different directions, some went far away to get a fullscale view of the area, others went to look at things up close to decide on the small scale processes. We came up with many theories and ideas and then crossed through them individually. This was an important process of elimination, going through the knowledge taht we posessed and then seeing if what we had in front of us fitted with what we knew. This allowed us to rule out several different explanations (glacial, volcanic…) and left us with a few to present to the lecturer. We didn’t get the answer spot on, but this process of leaving us in the desert for an hour and making us decide ourselves what we thought was going on was very rewarding. I didn’t just wait for the answer, I wanted to find it out, it gave me (and everyone else) a hunger for the knowledge but also the determination to find out as much as the story as we could for ourselves.
We had many days like this. Look-see and then discussed what was happening… It really made me switch on, use my brain and actually learn something about how to understand landscapes and how they form, a skill I could not have formed in Arts Tower lecture theatre 4.
Source: nat351