Being Your Own Best Advocate:Geoscience Education Researchers and the Tenure Track in Traditional Geoscience Programs

摘要

Geoscientists have seen the boundaries between traditional geology and other science fields become more permeable as geoscience research questions have evolved to better capture the transdisciplinary nature of the natural world. From geochemistry to geophysics to geobiology, the value of a transdisciplinary approach to complex and meaningful research questions is evident in each of these fields. Research on geoscience teaching and learning is following a similar path, but has the added complexity of crossing over with the social sciences (e.g., educational psychology), which introduces research methods useful, but less familiar, to many geoscientists. This is one of the reasons that Feig (2013) called for targeted "marketing" by geoscience education researchers to contextualize their research and build community, a concept echoed by Lukes et al (2015). I think this advice is a time-sensitive action item for one group of geoscience education researchers in particular-those who are currently on the tenure-track. While it is important for all tenure-track faculty to talk with their department colleagues early and often about what they do, how they do it, and why it is important (St. John and Leckie, 2009), it is especially true for tenure-track geoscience education scholars in traditional geoscience programs.