Rethinking geoscience to be discussed at Bates
Kate Hausbeck, Maralee Mayberry and Peg Rees, faculty members from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, will discuss Just Beneath the Surface: (Re) Integrating Knowledge, (Re) Designing Geoscience Courses and (Re) Reading Geoscience Texts from 4:15 to 5:30 p.m. Feb. 5 in Room 204 of Carnegie Science. The public is invited to attend free of charge.
The focus of the talk will be how curricular materials in geoscience contain underlying assumptions that have implications for all students, particularly those who are traditionally marginalized. The talk, sponsored by the college’s Women and Scientific Literacy Seminar series and women’s studies program, and funded by a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, will address how the integration of the natural and social sciences and women’s studies can change content and teaching methodology in the earth science classroom.
Hausbeck, Mayberry and Rees are members of a collaborative group PROMISE: Projects for Multicultural and Interdisciplinary Study and Education. Funded by the National Science Foundation, PROMISE is a social study of geology experiment, based on the contention that feminist theory and pedagogy have been marginalized in science and science education and that science had been marginalized in feminist education.
Mayberry, of the Department of Sociology, and Rees of the Department of Geoscience, are co-founders of PROMISE and team-teach Earth Systems: A Feminist Approach. Mayberry has written about feminist pedagogy and science education, and her articles have appeared in the Journal of Research on Science Teaching, Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering and the National Women’s Studies Association Journal. Rees teaches courses on sedimentology and specializes in Antarctic research.
Hausbeck, of the Department of Sociology, teaches feminist theory and environmental sociology courses. Her methodological expertise is in qualitative and quantitative content analysis. She has conducted a content analysis of geoscience texts for PROMISE and is the co-author of Just Beneath the Surface: Re-Reading Geoscience, Re-Scripting the Knowledge/Power Nexus.
