Field trips, camps, and courses are considered a critical experience in the education of future geoscientists. Traditional bedrock geologic mapping continues to play a prominent role in field courses and a robust body of research describes how students gain content, skills, habits of mind, social engagement, and identity as a geologist in field settings. However, little work has examined instructional practices that lead to meaningful learning of geologic mapping. During a semi-structured interview, we asked 67 novice to professional geologists to reflect on how and where they learned geologic mapping. When analyzed through the lens of situated learning theory (Lave and Wenger 1991), responses from these geologists shed light on best practices for mapping instruction in field settings. Our findings highlight two contrasting forms of instruction and the importance of a community of practice. In structured instruction, students and instructors worked together through a prescribed learning progression. Conversely, in ill-structured instruction participants described receiving little guidance on how to progress. Overall, our participants reflected positively on learning experiences that built upon sufficient prior knowledge, allowed for some struggle but included generous instructor support, and provided the opportunity to work collaboratively with other learners. Our participants found regular feedback to be highly beneficial. We suggest that appropriate activities and assessments that encourage both teamwork (collaboration) and independent studies should be incorporated into field instruction. Additionally, the results of our study suggest that the community of practice is a crucial contributor to learning to map and that the learning is defined as much by the professional domain shared between novices and experts as it is by the physical domain provided by the complex Earth environment. In order for a learner to be authentically involved in the actual practice of an expert, the learner must work with and learn from the community of practice.

The need to train a scientific workforce in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change drives an international need for climate change education, including in Ghana. How pre-service teachers understand the concept of climate change, and the often misunderstood relationship between ozone depletion and global warming, critically impacts the students they will teach and the community at large. This mixed-method, descriptive study documents pre-service teachers’ climate change and ozone depletion conceptions, and describes the sources of these conceptions. An open-ended and Likert-type questionnaire adapted from Boyes and Groves (1994) was administered to 300 participants from three colleges of education in Ghana. Thirty of the participating pre-service teachers then completed a semi-structured interview. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS, and interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and coded together with the open-ended survey questions. Results of the quantitative analysis suggest that many pre-service teachers hold the idea that climate change results from ozone holes allowing more ultraviolet solar radiation to reach the Earth. Participants understand that ozone is a layer of gas high up in the atmosphere that protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation, but they lack an understanding of what causes ozone depletion and the consequences of depletion. Participants also identified textbooks (79.9%), instructors (63.5%) and the media/internet (62.1%) as the sources of their ozone layer and climate change knowledge. Qualitative data suggest that participants lack an understanding of the exact position of the ozone layer in the atmosphere, how ozone forms, its relation to ground level UV radiation and natural processes that lead to ozone depletion. Participants also confused climate change with the change in seasons and weather, and could not clearly articulate why they think ozone depletion is linked to climate change. This study adds to existing climate change conceptions literature, identifies new misconceptions held by pre-service teachers and identifies the sources of their conceptions, which provides further information about the learning resources available to students.

Geoscience employers have increasingly called for the future workforce (students) to demonstrate competence in non-technical skills, including teamwork. This descriptive qualitative study contributes to ongoing efforts to identify the specific practices, skills, habits, and knowledge that make up these desired teamwork competencies in the geosciences. We collected data from three online focus group discussions centered around teamwork. Focus group participants were hydrogeology and environmental geology employers and team managers from government, private industry, and non-profit organizations in the United States. Using the Marks et al. (2001) teamwork taxonomy model as our conceptual framework, we generated three categories of teamwork skills specific to environmental geoscience teams. First, our data indicate that these employers value team transition skills related to specifying goals, interpreting team tasks, identifying resources, and planning. The second category of desired teamwork competencies included action skills such as metacognition, coordination and mentoring. These skills directly impact successful task completion. The third category captured interpersonal skills such as emotional intelligence, proactive communication, and organization. A fourth category of desired teamwork competencies emerged from data analysis and include ethical skills related to trust, integrity and humility. This study provides a detailed description of teamwork competencies desired by environmental geoscience employers and suggests implications for how to prepare students for this workforce.