Page 55 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
53
Figure 1: The differences in resources used for teaching and learning (T&L) as well as research at the undergraduate, honours, master’s and PhD levels.
The setting and strategy for facilitating the transition
In the Applied and Environmental Mineralogy (GLG8X05) module, where we teach the subject of Environmental Isotope Geochemistry as a two-week course, we use classroom seminars (Parker 2001) as an avenue for incorporating journal articles into teaching and learning.
The Geology honours qualification has nine modules and, apart from the research project module that runs throughout the year, all the other modules are presented one at a time in blocks of three to eight weeks. GLG8X05 is the very first module, presented over four to five weeks with continuous assessment. The number of students taking the module
is usually between 10 and 20. During the two weeks of the Environmental Isotope Geochemistry course, we deliver nine to ten lectures that are two to three hours long on three methodological topics: stable isotopes, radioactive isotopes and cosmogenic nuclides. A textbook or selected book chapters are prescribed as required supplementary reading for each of these three topics. At the undergraduate level, these three topics are either not presented at all (in most institutions) or they are briefly introduced as methods that are useful for research. However, the majority of master’s and doctoral projects in Geology will have a component that includes one or more of these topics. The Environmental Isotope Geochemistry lectures are presented in the mornings, and we reserve the afternoons for
a single practical assignment, completed on the second day of the course, and the seminar sessions that run from the third or fourth afternoon until the end of the two weeks, depending on the number of students.