Vol. 1, No. 1: Spring/Summer 2005
The Synergy of Collaborative Teaching
by Deborah Galyan
“The more our teaching reflects the complexity of the real world, the more empowered our students will be to do good things for themselves and their communities.”—John Rupp
Whether he’s leading undergraduates through the Sierra Nevada mountains, or helping secondary school teachers understand the geology of karst topography in southern Indiana, John Rupp has been teaching since arriving at the Indiana Geological Survey in 1982. A senior research scientist and Assistant Director for Research of the Survey, Rupp focuses his research and service primarily on the subsurface geology of Indiana, but his educational efforts span a wide range of earth science –related topics. On any given day, that might mean helping a farmer find oil and gas on his property, or teaching graduate students about the complexities of a new technology for reducing greenhouse gases.
“I really enjoy sharing my knowledge with others,” Rupp says. “Geology is so amenable to experiential learning. A textbook, even one with beautiful illustrations, can’t compare to taking a group of students to the mouth of a cave in southern Indiana. Geologists have access to so many fertile places for experiential, interactive learning.”
Much of Rupp’s teaching falls under the category of service and educational outreach to Indiana citizens, an important aspect of the IGS mission. As an expert in the exploration and development of subsurface energy resources, he frequently works with Indiana companies, regulatory agencies, and special interest groups who want information about coal, oil, and gas resources, but are sometimes on opposite sides of an issue. “At the Survey, our research is applied,” he explains. “We are here to provide information and technical data on Indiana geology to the public—it might be a coal company one week and the Sierra Club the next—but we don’t make recommendations, because IGS is an impartial, nonpartisan, scientific institute.”
“As a research institute of IU,” Rupp continues, “we serve the educational mission of the university. Much of what I do is educational, though it doesn’t always fit the model of teaching as traditionally conceptualized and practiced at the university. If we create an artificial division between educational outreach and teaching we needlessly inhibit the learning process.”
Rupp’s love of teaching has led to several formal partnerships with teaching faculty, including the ongoing collaboration with professor of geological sciences Michael Hamburger, with whom Rupp teaches the popular expeditions course Volcanoes of the Eastern Sierra Nevada: Geology and Natural Heritage of the Long Valley Caldera.
One thing about collaborative teaching that Rupp particularly enjoys is the “interesting synergy,” as he describes it, between a research institute and an academic department. “Partnerships like the one Michael Hamburger and I have can broaden the way we get students to think about important aspects of the subject,” he observes. “I like to weave basic geological science in with more practical issues, like natural resource and land use—the practical ramifications on civilization and its needs.”
Last spring, Rupp partnered with geological sciences faculty member Mark Person, to teach a graduate seminar that offered a complex theory-and-practice approach to the topic of carbon sequestration. Carbon sequestrations is a rapidly growing theoretical technology that could potentially help slow global warming by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) entering the atmosphere through a process of capturing and storing or “sequestering” it underground. Students presented research on concepts that integrated theoretical results with applied technological solutions. The rapidly evolving subject provided plenty of opportunity for inquiry and debate, fostered in the course by the use of the Oncourse online teaching environment and active learning classroom techniques.
Approaching carbon sequestration from both theoretical and technical points of view helped the students develop a more sophisticated understanding of the technology, including its political and social implications. “Ordinarily, the students wouldn’t have had such a complex look at the topic—that’s one benefit of teaching collaborations. Mark led on the theoretical constraints, while I focused on applied technological aspects.”
And Rupp believes that creative teaching collaborations can help students avoid seeing the world as “vertically partitioned.” “We don’t want students to graduate from college seeing the world only in terms of their own majors or disciplines,” he says. “As teachers, we have a responsibility to introduce complexity into their educations, because the world and solutions to its problems are complex. Collaborations between research institutes and teaching departments often lead to the kind of interdisciplinary curriculum building that we must develop in order to adequately understand and address issues like global warming.”
In the future, Rupp hopes to see the development of multidisciplinary curriculum initiatives that address environmental stewardship and global resource utilization. And he would be happy if every student could graduate with at least some basic energy literacy, equipped to answer questions like: Where does my electricity come from? What is the real cost of oil? What is the environmental impact of using my computer?
“I see it as an empowerment issue,” he explains. “The more our teaching reflects the complexity of the real world, the more empowered our students will be to do good things for themselves and their communities.”
Deborah Galyan is a novelist and freelance writer in Bloomington.
