EARTH223/ENVIRON233 is a companion laboratory course to EARTH222 Introductory Oceanography meant to provide hands-on experience associated with selected lecture topics. As we returned to a residential college experience after the Covid19 pandemic, we re-evaluated our curriculum and it became apparent that Earth223 no longer meets students’ expectations and instructors’ teaching philosophies or needs.

All our labs will benefit from a student-centered re-design process. Some labs mostly will need updates and the purchase of materials to make them more hands-on, inquiry-based, and experiential. For others, we will create new laboratory exercises that utilize facilities and collections like the Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory, Natural History Museum, Clark Library, and Zoology Museum. We also have the opportunity of adding new curriculum by utilizing three vacated weeks.

This will be a collaborative experience involving faculty, researchers, and graduate and undergraduate students. We particularly value the perspective of undergraduate students that so far has been absent from our curriculum development. We want to hire undergraduates who took the course, science and non-science majors, as curriculum development assistants to help design and evaluate new activities that will replace or add to our current curriculum.

This process will be iterative, happening over a full year, allowing us to conduct interviews, focus groups, surveys, mid-term evaluations, and content knowledge assessments before and after the re-design.

This project will serve as a prototype allowing other Earth faculty to re-design or improve introductory labs, and we will disseminate the data collected to inform best practices for laboratory curriculum development.