 Good morning. It's delightful to be here. I was thinking as I was getting ready to put my thoughts together for this talk that I really came of age as a scientist at the same time computational modeling was coming of age. And when I went to graduate school, I really wanted to bring the kinds of equations and numbers approaches that I learned in physics class together with all the fun that I had out in the field and in my geoscience classes. And when I started my PhD, that was pretty new, relatively new at that time. And I had a wonderful time exploring that turf. And it's just delightful to be here and to see how far it's come in all those years. I don't get to do that anymore. It's just really a privilege to hear the science at the forefront and how far that's come. I think it's one of the really important things that geoscientists do. I now spend almost all of my time working on geoscience education and education more broadly. I spend a lot of time helping faculty be better teachers. And I like to think I spend some time helping strengthen the education that people in the United States in particular receive. So today, I'm gonna talk to you about sort of the intersection of your world of modeling and geoscience and my world of geoscience education. And I hope you'll find that interesting. What I'm gonna do is to talk, the first place you obviously would wanna start is why is modeling important in geoscience education? And I thought that might be a pretty soft sell to this group that I probably wouldn't have a whole lot to say that you hadn't already thought of. So what I'm gonna try and do first is to outline from the point of view of the people that I talk to in education and in particular, both K-12 and higher education who are not already completely convinced that modeling is really important. How would you go about making that argument to them and what's the nature of that argument? And then I'm gonna try and spend a little bit of time showing you what we know about teaching particularly complex systems with models. I'm gonna touch a little bit about time and rates because I know that's the sort of focus of this conference. And what I hope you'll get out of that is just a sort of sense of what the analogous, if to the extent that what I do can be described I'm not a real researcher, other people are doing real research in education. But I'm gonna showcase a little bit of that so that you can get a sense of what those methods are like just as an analogy since I get to sit here and learn a little bit about your methods. So that's the plan. So the first thing I would say is that there's very broad interest in models in education. And the first thing one would do if I was trying to make an argument for teaching about models. And I'm gonna talk here about models as a tool and a method, not so much about the specific use of models in geoscience. But if you were gonna start making that argument you'd look for what the mandate was. And the mandate is out there particularly in K-12. So K-12 has more mandate-like documents than higher education does. And you may know that the sort of overarching framework, I'm gonna talk from a US perspective, education is not as thoroughly internationalized as science is, so I apologize to the international people in the audience. But I'm very interested in how what I say about the US is gonna translate from your perspective in other educational systems. And I hope I'll get some feedback on that. In the United States, the guiding document for science education is the science education standards which were developed in the late 90s or in the 90s. And you may know that those are currently being revised. The national academies have just finished a process where they've been developing a framework for the next generation science standards. And that document came out at the end in the early fall. And the big difference between the old science education standards which were the first time we'd had sort of a consensus opinion from the scientific community about what were the priorities for K-12 science education. The big difference between the new framework and the old science education standards is that it gives fully equal weight to understanding the process of science and understanding the outcomes of scientific research. And it places that all very strongly in a human context. And that means that there's a very strong interest in modeling. So this is just drawn from that document. These are the eight practices we deem to be essential elements of a K-12 science and engineering curriculum. And you can see that developing and using models is the number two one on this list. I actually very much like this list. I wasn't involved in developing it. The frameworks were developed by the national academies using a national academy like process. And the people who were involved were a sort of 50-50 mix of scientists and educators. And they made a big effort to make sure that the scientists were largely national academy members. So that's the first piece is that modeling is clearly recognized as an important part of science when we're teaching as an essential practice of science. If you look in the geosciences more specifically in the last couple of years, there's been a lot of work developing these literacy principles. There are ocean, atmosphere, climate and earth science literacies. The earth science literacies also have a sort of method section and modeling is drawn out in that. So at this level, there's a really strong understanding that modeling is an important part of scientific education and certainly of a geoscience education in the K-12 system. There is some distance between what's in these documents and what happens and I'm not gonna talk about that but I'd be happy to chat about that over lunch. In higher education, there aren't these kinds of documents. Instead in higher education, the mandate for what's taught in higher education really comes largely from two points of view. One is a sort of workforce point of view and in that I'm gonna include developing the scientific workforce and particularly the research scientists of tomorrow which would be the sort of path through graduate school on into research in academia. And the other is the sort of liberal education point of view. What is it that every student coming through college needs to know? On the workforce end, the geo-vision report gives us a good place to look for what the sort of research direction is and how you would conceive of the curriculum in higher education geoscience in terms of heading towards where research is going and as I'm sure all of you know, understanding and forecasting, behavior of complex and evolving systems is the first thing that they talk about in that vision. Thinking more broadly about the workforce, I put up the Gathering Storm document. Most of the arguments about workforce beyond geoscience and specific are about the importance of the need for a stem, for a larger stem workforce and that's really based on the notion that there are lots of predictions we're gonna be short on stem people. I'm not as convinced about those as I might be if I could see the numbers but there's also this notion that the stem workforce does work that's highly leveraged and influences everyone else. To the extent that we make a case that modeling is an essential aspect of science and is essential to developing the stem workforce, there's quite a strong workforce mandate for modeling and science. The other part of the mandate, I don't have any pictures of, but is the liberal education mandate and there you can think about what are institutions of higher education talking about when they're setting their general education requirements and there's two things that I think are interesting from my point of view. My point of view is sort of what comes out of liberal arts colleges because that's where I work. I work at Carleton College which is a liberal arts college and then extends to looking at what people are talking about in other kinds of comprehensive and research universities and looking at the world from that point of view, people are very interested in the notion of critical thinking, of being able to have all graduates leave with the ability to reason from evidence and the other big item I see talked about a lot is quantitative reasoning. I don't see people talking as much as they used to about the importance of science, that every student should have a science. Science is now inside this sort of broader framework of arguing from evidence and quantitative reasoning and I think in both cases a much stronger argument could be made for modeling and the importance of modeling as a skill that every citizen needs to have both to make good use of the information that comes to them from models and as just a way of structuring their ability to reason from argument. I haven't seen that argument made so that might be something your community would like to take on. My slides are in different order than I anticipated. So let me just talk then about backing off, that's sort of the big picture if you wanted to argue really big picture. If you wanted to argue inside a geoscience department which is where many of us spend our energy or then I think there are sort of three ways you can argue for the importance of models in undergraduate geoscience education. The first is about the role of models in science and I think you can make the case that models are essential in geoscience and that geoscience is a case study for how models play out in the breadth of sciences so I'm gonna go into that a little bit more. The second case I think you can make is about understanding complex systems where models play I think a central role as one of the most important tools for helping people really develop a complex systems perspective and I'm gonna talk a little bit more. And then the third is a workforce argument which I'm gonna just touch on but not talk about so much. Making this first argument, the role of models in geoscience, I'm gonna draw on work that I've been involved with in a project led by Kim Castens is just about to, we just sent the book that the project produced off to the editors at GSA so it'll produce a special volume per GSA. That was work bringing together people not just geoscientists, half geoscientists and half other kinds of people like philosophers and cognitive scientists, psychologists, anthropologists to talk about what do we know about, what it means to be a geoscientist and about teaching and learning sort of essential aspects of geoscience. So that was a very interesting process because you got a little, on the one hand the geoscientist knew much more about what geoscience meant to be, what it meant to do geoscience but the other people had a much broader perspective and could put things in context that really helped. So from this work thinking about what does it mean to be a geoscientist, I'm sure well versed in the fact that we all fight about what a geoscientist has to take in school all the time because our field is so broad and so we were trying to get an intellectual framework in which we could address what is it that the curriculum should look like and this was sort of an essential piece in that work which was developing the notion that there are perspectives that no matter what kind of geoscientist you are are shared among all geoscientists and at this point I would say this is a hypothesis so if this doesn't resonate with you it would be good for me to hear about it but these are items that came out of that work that have resonated with the people I've talked to and they are not the things that we fight about when we're fighting about what we should teach in the geoscience curriculum and just coming right after Jorge's talk you can almost see these coming, you can see the example that he gave of all four of these things coming together in his presentation, observations of the natural system I understand in the framework of a complex system reflecting a history of geologic time and organized geographically, spatially and temporally. The modeling piece plays in I think particularly important in this complex systems part but you guys might be in a better position than I am to talk about how all modeling is related to our ability to develop in students all four of these things which for my money are sort of at the heart of what we're trying to have our students leave with. The other piece of work I wanna draw from this is a set of ideas about how we as a discipline test hypotheses, you may know that or you may remember that for at least all of my lifetime science has been taught in the K-12 system as having a method and that if you looked at that method it is very strongly influenced by the need to do controlled single variable experiments and that if you thought about its relationship to your work as scientists you often scratched your head and wondered how they related. That has now become, that's an important topic of work in education broadly is understanding how to teach students and how to convey the complexity of science as a way of thinking and so in that context we spent a lot of time thinking about what does it mean to test a hypothesis in geoscience as opposed to in physics or in social science or in anything else literature if you wanna think about literature is having hypotheses they test they call them theories but unless. These are the ideas that rose to the top as being really central. The first one is the one that's related to our use of case studies of studying specific field areas and then comparing between either cases in time or cases in place. The second is the notion that we bring together lots of different kinds of lines of evidence usually because no single line of evidence has all of the evidence that we need so we're always working with converging lines of incomplete data and then third is the testing understanding through prediction which I would call models and I wanna emphasize here that I don't think this is a new thing. I don't think this means computer models. I think we have always tested understanding through prediction and when I think about when I first worked in the field the notion that you are working on a, you think you're working on a fold and that you think you're standing on the north limb of a fold of an anticline that means you predict what you're gonna find on the south limb of the anticline and where that is and then you go there and check it right and that's a different kind of testing. That's also kind of testing understanding through prediction not as sophisticated as, well equally sophisticated but not as computationally intensive as what we do when we test predictions, understanding through prediction with models. We also test models by going backwards. I don't wanna take that out but those are the ideas that came in and you can quickly see how critical models are if that's computational models, analog models, all kinds of models becomes thinking about the whole notion of conceptual models and testing with models become critical in helping a student understand how geoscience moves forward. So learning about the role that models play in geoscience is part of understanding geoscience and a way to understand models more broadly and I think that can be, that is an argument that we should be making hay with both in terms of making sure that our students get really strong exposure to models and models in their role in geoscience inside the department and inside the courses we teach but also in terms of helping our institutions and our policy makers and other people understand why it's important for students to have opportunities to learn geoscience. And then let me just say this about what do we mean when we say they should get to learn about models? That's actually something that one has to, that needs to be articulated clearly and this was me thinking off of the top of my head and this again is an area where I think you would, I would be really interested in your insights. Thinking at the level of a student coming out of an undergraduate degree that, or out of high school either one, that wasn't necessarily gonna be a geoscientist. What is it they should know? They should know the difference between models and reality. I'm sure that drives you guys nuts as it does me when people get those two things confused. They need to understand the relationship between the role of assumptions in models. They need to know how one goes about testing the results of a model. Is the model working the way you want it to work? They need to understand the uncertainty that's inherent in the results that come from models. They need to know how to use the results that come from models. I'm always struck, I always remember that the day that they had the really bad floods in Grand Forks, I'm in Minnesota and the citizens were up in arms because the water had come in higher than the predicted flood stage and they had no sense of the notion that the way to use the model results was not to look at the exact inch of the flood stage and sand bank only to that. So knowing how to use the results and how they play in their lives. And then the role of models in science which again going back to the notion of how science, the importance of people understanding what science is and how it moves forward. There's the right hand side are things that are on our website about teaching with models which I'm not gonna talk about the pedagogy of how people currently teach with data and with models but those are resources if you wanted to learn more that you could look at. So how am I doing? I have about five minutes. Is that where I am? So I wanna, my other sort of thing I wanna really emphasize is this notion of teaching complex systems which I think I've already laid out for you how I think that fits into being a geoscientist. But I actually think this is one of the very, very most important things that we do as geoscience instructors, geoscience faculty, geoscience teachers. This is I think the strongest place in the curriculum for students to learn about what a complex system is and how they work and in particular to develop some, a revised view of the world based on understanding complex systems. And to me that means that we all become as soon as we understand the way complex systems works in the complexity of the earth system we've become much more humble. We come to understand that thinking that we're gonna understand the earth system in a way that we can predict extremely accurately when an earthquake is gonna happen or what the weather is gonna be is a very challenging and complex thing to do that we come to expect that there'll be impacts far from the source, if a system is perturbed they're gonna be impacts far from the source in time and space and that they're gonna be unanticipated consequences. And if we took that stance in our approach to our interactions with the natural world that would be a huge shift in the way we work. So I think that's incredibly important and is really laid out as a goal for in all of these literacy principles. But I actually think it's even more important than that for people to understand complex systems it changes your worldview. It changes the way you think about cause and effect. It makes cause and effect a much more complicated thing. And that changes the way that you understand the things that happen to you from the reason why your boyfriend broke up with you to why it is you got the job or didn't get the job to why it is that our foreign policy might be the way it is. And I just think at the moment we still have really a culture in which a linear cause and effect model is very dominant. And one of the most important things we can do as educators is to help people come to understand complex systems. That is an opportunity we have and a really important piece of work to do and probably the strongest argument for why geoscience should be much more important in the K-12 curriculum because I'm gonna finish up in a hurry now. We've done some work on, brought together a lot of people who research and work in complex systems and their teaching of complex systems. And the sort of first order conclusion is that understanding complex systems takes time. It's not something you can do in a single class. Anybody who's tried to do that can tell you that. And as a consequence I'd say this is a huge argument for a learning progression that extends K-16 deals with models in complex systems. So I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you very much, Cathy. Questions? I understand the emphasis in better teaching geosciences but one thing that puzzles me in the US but also I think in South America where I grew up and was educated and in Western Europe where I have friends who are educators is that in kindergarten through high school or secondary school 12th grade there simply is not much education on geosciences. The number of hours is appallingly low. Most kids come to college without having had a single hour of instruction in geology. They have geography where they see a little bit, maybe a little bit of geology but not real geology. Is that being addressed in the new guidelines? Simply the number of hours besides everything else and improving the quality? That's a great question. And let me start by saying that education is a complex system just like the earth system. And part of the reason I make these arguments to you is so that we are better equipped to argue that case. So in my understanding the reason why geoscience is not represented more fully in the K-12 curriculum is a historical one that there was a meeting of the minds in the last century, actually the two centuries ago that decided that physics, chemistry and biology were the core, this was probably replacing Latin. As the core, so we've been fighting against that decision. Now when the first science standards were written in the 90s, the huge victory for geoscience was that geoscience was considered a full partner in that. So there are four fields in the old standards and in the new ones and earth science, earth and space science is one of them. So that was the first step towards really making geoscience a more integral part of the K-12 curriculum in the United States. The second step then is to get that implemented in the schools, so two things have been big in standing in the way of that implementation. One was the implementation of standardized tests, which took a lot of time away from science period but certainly took time away from geoscience because we were not fully represented in the science test. And the second, I forgot what the second, the second huge piece of implementation is that it's very hard to put new courses into, especially high school education because you have to make space for said new courses. So that is all being worked on very hard. It's been a challenge, there are many things that higher education people can do. It's a challenge because many universities don't accept earth science, high school earth science as a college lab science, which undermines our cause. Certainly the preparation of teachers has been a challenge and those teachers receive their geoscience education in the colleges of higher education in the United States. So those are the places, those are two sides of the issue you can work on. One is making sure that everybody's being well prepared and that earth science counts in the higher education system and the other is sort of paying attention to what's happening in your state in terms of just describing the K-12 curriculum, defining the K-12 curriculum. I really agree with you about the importance of a complex systems perspective, not just in geosciences, but in many other phenomena. But from someone who's, I mean, I've been involved in trying to think how we can educate in this and you're looking at K-12, teachers who are teaching have no idea about complex systems. Education programs at universities have no idea about complex systems. Largely universities do not teach anything about complex systems broadly across the university and then the policy making bodies that actually decide what the curriculum's gonna be having a clue. So do you have any idea where we would start? Well, you know, my approach to questions like this is you have to start all places at one time, which means that, you know, it's just like where do you start to learn about geoscience, right? You have to learn everything at once before it all makes sense. So start all places at the same time, which means it has to be a big effort. But among the places we can start are making sure that inside geoscience programs, which we have more where we have a lot more influence than we have at the university level, we're doing a really robust job of integrating systems thinking across the curriculum. Then I think I look to GIS as a really nice model. We, you know, in many places GIS started out inside the geoscience curriculum and has now migrated out. So there are strategies that come from that. So those are sort of two kinds of approaches that are local. Then I think it's also equally important to start with these arguments about how can we be leaving this out of all the things that we teach? And it's important to show the applicability of complex systems and complex systems thinking, not just inside science, but outside science. That would be my... There's also a whole bunch of research things. I mean, the slides I didn't show, this is cheating. Where there's research about, that has to be done, about how do you go about teaching complex systems, right? So right now, we don't, A, we don't know how, if you're gonna find a student who knows what a complex system is or understands complex systems, how would you recognize them? That's not particularly well articulated. And then students learn, especially if you're talking K-12, they learn things as they mature in their brain. So what's the sequence that, what's the progression look like as you go from not knowing anything to having that fully developed point of view? And what's the relationship to learning about cause and effect? Cathy, do you have any idea what is the percentage of the earth scientists who does the modeling? Oh, no, I don't. Well, I mean, you mean computational modeling? Yes. I'm sure it's growing. Maybe James can answer this question. James, I would like to know how do the members CSDMS? What percentage of members belong to geosciences? Because my feeling is, see, the modeling work is not done by the geosciences. Everyone has a different meaning of what geoscience is. Geoscience to the National Science Foundation includes atmospheric earth science and ocean science. So if you take that geoscience, everyone here is a member of that. If you take the more narrow world that geoscience is just geology, you would say maybe 50% of the people in the room would wear that badge one way or the other. But the modeling is done mainly by the engineers. No, very few. No, I would say that most of the people in this room who would consider themselves geoscience geologists do modeling. It's just that they're not representative of the big, large group of geologists who maybe down to 20% representation in those fields. But the geosciences in departments around the country are getting very quantitative. 20 years ago, that wasn't the case, but I'd say most professors are teaching some level set of skills in quantitative modeling.