Page 64 - Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century

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Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching and Learning 2021
Involving industry specialists in developing practicals
Place-based education requires the deliberate inclusion and incorporation of local phenomena in the development and design of curricula (Smith 2002; Semken et al. 2017). Apart from the theory, the second major teaching and learning opportunity for most Geology students is the practical classes (King 2008; Thomas & Roberts 2009; Vasconcelos 2016). In Geology, practicals refer to students’ learning by doing, including: (1) describing and identifying minerals and rocks in hand specimens or under the microscope; and (2) using real-world, including laboratory, data to determine rock composition and other properties, and so on.
In the past, APG2B did not have practical classes allocated in the timetable and 2020 was the first year that the module was allocated practical classes and then had additional time to conduct practicals weekly. To that end, we successfully applied for funding from the University Teaching Innovation Fund in 2020 to aid in the development of practical materials and assessments. One of the uses of the funding was to appoint two industry specialists
so that they could use their know-how regarding industry’s requirements on our graduates and help us develop some practical assessments that were current and relevant to industry. In using authentic case studies and data collected by industry-based specialists in the development of practical assessments, our students may be best prepared for employment upon graduation.
Ms Katlego Segole, a practising engineering geologist, and Ms Itumeleng Mogatusi, a geohydrologist and sustainability integration specialist, were appointed to assist in the development of four engineering geology and three environmental geology practicals, respectively. These practicals were prepared using real-world examples and laboratory results (authentic case studies), using data collected by these specialists during the
course of their work. By working with local, real-world data and scenarios, the practical assessments allow students to fully enjoy the benefits of the pragmatic approach through the experiential learning theory. Some of these practicals were data- and calculation-based assessments, and we happened to put them together fortuitously at the right time because they were appropriate and optimal for online teaching in 2020.
For the environmental geology section, the three practicals developed with Ms Mogatusi focused on groundwater management in open pit mining. In the first practical, the students are given a task of designing a mine dewatering programme intended for maintaining
dry mining conditions, which increases safety in the mine and also reduces the impact
of groundwater on mining and vice versa. In this practical, the students learn project management, and planning and organising skills that they can use outside Geology and in the workplace. Figure 1 shows the process of planning a mine dewatering programme and the key actions and data deliverables that must be considered. The second practical involves the use of data to design groundwater monitoring wells, water flow calculations, plotting of hydrographs and determining the average drawdown over time, etc. This practical uses the mine setting to contextualise the theoretical concepts of groundwater management and exploitation, taught in the lectures mainly from the domestic and agricultural settings. The second practical also helps the students with improving their arithmetic, computation and data visualisation skills. The third practical builds on the first two as it involves communicating the impact of the groundwater management plan on the mining operations to the stakeholders. This is done using plots and models intended to visualise the scientific data for interpretation and communication of the science to non-scientists (Figure 2).