 Welcome Kathy. This is just a half hour discussion and my name is Jen Mixes-Olt. I am the chair of this committee on ocean acoustics education and expertise. We have been, as a committee, we've been having multiple information gathering sessions and we've had them on higher education, early career professionals, outreach and DEI, workforce development and I know that you were invited to the higher education information gathering session that your schedule was not in in conjunction with that so we didn't want to miss having that discussion with you so thank you first off for just spending 30 minutes with us and the way I think we'll just jump right into it I'm going to just introduce myself and the committee briefly and then turn it over to you to allow you time to introduce yourself to the committee and then we can just jump into discussion so I have just two other slides here. Again my name is Jen Mixes-Olt. I'm the chair of this committee. I am from the University of New Hampshire where I serve as the director of the Center for Acoustics Research and Education and these are our committee members. I'm joined by Andrea Ungueles from Penn State, Art Baggerer from MIT, Lisa Hoddling from Idaho's Education, Wu Zhang Li from the University of Washington, Carolyn Ruple from USGS, Yale Spilcroft from the University of Rhode Island and Preston Wilson from the University of Texas, Austin. Not everybody was able to make it today but as you saw at the beginning we are recording this number one so it can be reviewed by those that committee members that weren't able to join us today and it does become part of the public archive in association with the information gathering effort for the committee. This is the statement of task for our committee given by our Office of Naval Research sponsor. It is heavily ocean acoustics related and I understand that you may not have a full ocean acoustics background. We hope that your insight into interdisciplinary science and education will really help us inform number four here, exploration of strategies to raise the profile of careers in ocean acoustics including education, training, workforce recruitment and retention. Ocean acoustics is a highly interdisciplinary field and we recognize that there are other highly interdisciplinary fields that we hope to learn more from that we can bring into our field. The one I keep coming back to is highly interdisciplinary is forensics and some of the challenges associated with other interdisciplinary fields may be sharing some successes in that area or recommendations or challenges in how you resolve them so any of that is is open to discussion but before we get into that I'm going to do you have slides to share for your introduction or would you just like me to stop sharing? I don't have any slides. Then let me stop sharing so we can all see each other a little bit bigger than a teeny little postage there we go. So the floor is yours Kathy. I'm Kathy Manduka. I was the founding director of the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College. That center is funded largely by the National Science Foundation and other granting agencies and it has over 20 years been an engine for faculty professional development and in particular the development of online resources for teaching coming out of that faculty development. So that work was all grounded in the notion of a large-scale community of practice or community of transformation we would call it now but at the time when it was started it was all about faculty talking to each other and helping each other understand what they were doing in the classroom and collectively solving problems and sharing resources. I also served as the executive director of the National Association of Geoscience Teachers for I guess about 10 years and that organization serves both faculty and K-12 teachers and so along the way I did a large amount of work that involved or was proximal to K-12 teacher preparation in addition to higher education. CERC expanded out of the Geosciences and did a lot of and still does a lot of work both in institutional transformation and in other disciplines and with two-year colleges and a you know a large variety of people that we collaborated with making use of this strategy of bringing together groups of people who had a shared interest and need and helping them to learn from each other and then share resources and collectively build resources. Perhaps most interesting to you was over the last decade I spent I had a large NSF center grant that was focused on teaching Geoscience in the context of societal issues both in Geoscience programs and then across the curriculum so that project really worked at how to make the Geosciences visible in other parts of the curriculum and then how to build interdisciplinary collaborations that would support teaching high quality teaching in the context of societal issues so that's is there anything else you want to know about me? Not perfect and it is the perfect lead into the question my first question actually is I'm very interested to learn a little bit more about your Geosciences education NSF grant that you just talked about in raising the visibility of Geosciences. What do you think was the most productive or successful outcome of that? How did you how did you raise that visibility because that is something that our field can learn a lot about raising the visibility of a field and its value then really plays right into recruitment and retention to the field so I was interested on your thoughts on what worked and what didn't. Yeah so I think that I think that the most successful piece of that in terms of raising visibility was moving Geoscience into the into classes and other disciplines and we were more it was easier it turned out it was a lot easier to build interdisciplinary general education or introductory courses that were external to other disciplines than it was to actually get somebody in a a different field to teach a unit that involved Geoscience so we were very successful at that in a lot of different places so like we we had collaborative the way the project worked was that we brought together teams of faculty and there was a rule that the teams were generally around three people and there was a rule that well actually that's not true but we did two kinds of teams we did teams that did two week modules and we did teams that did whole courses and the two-week module teams were three people and the teams for whole courses were up to five people and and there was a for the interdisciplinary courses and I wish we had done this for all courses but our own materials there was a rule that you had to have at least one geoscientist and at least one not geoscientist so that simple rule meant that that and every every person who participated in the curriculum development had to teach the course had to use the materials in their own course so that meant that the materials got used they had to be developed in a way that they could be used in the the teaching load of the faculty member who was not in the geosciences and they got used in that course and that had a couple of outcomes one is that because three people developed the materials and they all had to use them materials were quite adaptable and so they could be used in a lot of different contexts by a lot of different kinds of faculty and then the second outcome was that because of this because we had all of these faculty who are not geoscientist teaching them then that got the geosciences out into other parts of the curriculum that so the scale-up strategy was twofold on the one hand we did a lot of work to document sort of this is what CERC did or CERC does really well is that we documented the materials and put published them online with examples of people teaching them in different ways so they were really usable so the online resources were available the resources were available online in a in a package that was really usable and supported the faculty and teaching with them that turned out so we have big spread of effect just from that I don't know how much of that spread of effect was from or spread of that dissemination was outside the geosciences we don't have a you know the grant ended and there wasn't a mechanism for finding that out post post funding the other strategy was a we this was a large one-time only NSF grant and the other strategy we used was to have schools proposed projects that were that made use of the materials or generated new materials and and those projects many of them were interdisciplinary and that led to you know for example university one of the there was a university that decided it was going to teach all about rivers across the curriculum and so they picked that up and used many different materials in different parts of the curriculum focusing on their local river watershed so that kind of strategy where you went from you had materials and then you you scaled up by having a a institutionally based or departmental based or project that made use of them worked quite well so when you said schools was that what level schools were you talking about college these these were all undergraduate this is all undergraduate work okay schools within an undergraduate university got it not a k through 12 type school got it right so i see uh moujong has a question one from one of our committee members go ahead moujong yeah thank you um that was that was uh so great to learn about i have a follow-up question i was wondering what was the strategies uh that was used to attract these faculties or teachers to try to teach this like was there sort of specific angles you try to go into or was it i guess like part of it is also does it come from the instructors the faculty or does it come from more like a school or a department oriented sort of general direction there so um the the teams that developed the teaching materials were all faculty and they were all um uh the teams were required to have faculty from um three different institutions so they were multi institutional teams and um the way we so we did had two strategies for attracting them one we had used many times before which was to have workshops um what we called workshops which were were um different than in us nas workshops they were actual meetings were um 20 to 100 people would come together on a topic of common interest and they would present what they were currently doing they would learn from some people who were um uh important to to the general problem but not doing exactly what they were doing so we'd bring in uh you know a cognitive scientist or an educational expert or something that was relevant to them and then they would produce something collectively at the end um sometimes that was material sometimes it was a summary sometimes and that what they produced was oftentimes self-generated by the work by the workshop um that allowed us both to find out what was going on you know so that we weren't reinventing the wheel we were building on what was currently going on and to identify people who might be interested and to um uh you know and to advertise the fact that this other opportunity was coming up and um one that you might be interested in was we were very interested in trying to get geoscience into um into the engineering curriculum so so one one of the workshops which was held at at um school of minds color of school minds was geoscientist and engineers and in retrospect I wish we'd also had some social scientists there because they would have everybody was really very interested in going in that direction but anyway from that they sort of we we learned a lot about the geoscientist learned a lot about what the engineers were doing the engineers learned a lot about what the geoscientist were doing all of them knew in advance that they were going to come and and develop some ideas for curriculum modules that would be geoscience and engineering that could be taught in either curriculum and from that we got um a number of people who went on and did both courses and and um teaching materials um so that was that that I think it's a good general strategy both because it allows you to develop and and of course there were people we kept the names and addresses of all the people who came to that workshop so not all of them develop materials but then all of them could get informed when the materials were developed so you know that was a sort of a community building um strategy the other thing that we did with this particular grant was we paid them a lot of money and that was very effective in recruiting people and um uh and it was quite interesting in this case because it turned out that um you know we said you know you're gonna get we paid them I think we paid them seven thousand dollars to do a two week module on a team of three and that sounded like a lot more money than they should get but it meant that they had to develop materials test them in their classes revise them after they were tested they worked with an evaluation team that um looked at them both from a pedagogic standpoint and collected data on student learning and they had to revise um that group oversaw the revisions so they had to revise and then they had to publish them and getting them through to publication you know faculty loved to develop new materials and try them but they do not like to revise them and they do not like to publish them and so having sufficient money that we could just really heard them through all of that um turned out to be quite important awesome that is an awesome answer thank you so much I'm frantically taking notes um I'm seeing Gail has her hand up Gail yes hi Kathy nice to see you nice to see you too um could I'm very intrigued about um the integration of these modules across disciplines could you give us an example of um what a module that you thought was very successful and then uh which disciplines were able then to actually embed it into their curriculum I mean you I know you just mentioned um one that was um between geosciences and engineering but I'm wondering if you could be a little more specific and give us you know the topic and then how they were able to translate that to be used you know in in different fields sure I'm going to put in the chat the website for you guys and um uh so um I think there are a couple of different kinds of answers to that question as I said one of the most successful strategies was that we got um we got these interdisciplinary courses um that people could learn about I should say at this point that we were not particularly successful in recruiting out of these we raised the visibility of geoscience but we were not particularly successful in recruiting people into geoscience majors and we were more successful in recruiting people into environmental science majors perhaps not too surprisingly so I don't want to take you down a um a happy path that's not a true true true path um the there there were a why so there's a couple of different kinds of interdisciplinarity that went on here so there were there were modules that were developed that went from geoscience to things like environmental health or um uh natural disaster management um kinds of things and there so when I think about ocean acoustics I think about things like okay what are the other kinds of acoustics and can you get bridges from say medical acoustics or you know I don't know what the other that's the one I know about I there's engineering acoustics I'm sure so you know those would be kind of easy bridges and we got a lot we got a lot of modules that were jointly developed that went geology or geoscience and geography which is kind of that kind of nearest neighbor approach then there were other ones that were a lot further afield like there were a number of them were taught in literature or humanities courses and there you know the literature people are looking for you know either books or kinds of writing or um uh you know um kinds of writings you know kinds of writing styles where where it doesn't matter so much what the it matters a lot what the content is but there's a lot of variety and the kinds of content right so so that was another kind of sort of easy um relatively easy cross um particularly um and there was the one of the ones I love is called um is about using your senses and mapping the environment with sensory perception um which was used in in uh and each of these tells where there's each of these things is published with the um the list of courses in which it has been taught um or with with in which it was tested and also some example there are instructor stories from you know teaching the materials in that particular class and how they adapted them so when I say we had a lot of supporting materials we really had a lot of supporting um materials um so you know mapping with sensory perception with sensory perception was used in um a 200 level composition course it was used in a upper divisional environmental justice course and it was used in a introductory environmental course so you can kind of see and you can you can cruise your way through these I have to say that I ran the whole project and so I actually did not I'm not the person who really knows the modules the deep content of the modules the best so and so does that help yeah that that's great and I really like the thinking outside the box I don't think we have discussed um that level of creativity within our committee yet you know we've been talking a lot about the interdisciplinary nature of acoustics and how it's both in ocean science engineering animal biocoustics etc but I personally have never thought of um reaching out into the humanities for an example and there there are a lot of societal issues related to the use of underwater sound sources by people for example um that would lend itself nicely to to reaching out beyond um you know just the scientific borders so that was that was great thank you we found that it was easier I mean the engineering was an uh was a I mean you know that's a close cousin so that was the relatively straightforward but but like it would have been wonderful if we had gotten geoscience into biology or geoscience into physics and that's the harder lift and it was also much easier to get societal issues into introductory geoscience than it was to get it into the upper division um and uh you know I I'm not sure from uh so there are a lot of motivations for doing this we had a two prong goal one was a workforce goal but the other was just a science literacy you know environmental literacy goal so um you know those those are the exact goals that we are looking at right now and I think that you um the social sciences that you talked about that is a challenge for us and we need to meet that challenge as a field and you're tying it to societal needs and conflict like food security or energy security that's where acoustics can come into non-acoustics or even um the technical science classes the social sciences there's a lot that we have not even dipped our toe into pond yet and I think that I'm looking at the website that you put in the chat and that is inspiration for our field thank you for sharing something concrete that we can actually cite and like put in our report that's fantastic because this is something that has been has been tried and works so um yeah so I one thing I would say so I want to say two things because I realized so I didn't answer a whole question earlier which is that ideas for these modules we put out calls for proposals so we didn't we had some things that we um really wanted to accomplish like we wanted to get a whole introductory curriculum so we put out a call that a series of calls that was really about was evaluated the proposals were evaluated against what are what's missing what what do we need to have a complete course so it was not a you know what do you want to teach you know what do you want to do anything goes it was really you know we're looking for these topics that integrate societal issues into these things that form the indirect introductory curriculum we what we also had just plain open calls we're just looking for things that really integrate across broadly across the curriculum and that was where we really had this rigid rule that you know you can propose anything you want but you have to have a geoscientist and you have to have somebody who's not a geoscientist and you have to have three faculty who are willing to teach this and um so you know that combination worked well we really wanted some engineering modules we recruited those specifically and we held that specific workshop and we did we wanted some teacher preparation modules so there were some modules that were co-developed with people from the teacher education community or from the teacher education faculty when you put your call for proposals out was that internal to your university where these call for proposals just within your university or did you um look to team with people outside of your university oh this was entirely a national scale effort so in fact Carleton was hardly involved at all okay that was my I think two or three faculty from Carleton but they just went into the same pile as anybody as everybody else it was a national call we used um I think you know when we were trying to find geoscientists particularly solid earth geoscientists we had a strong community we could advertise to just like you have a strong ocean acoustics community you can advertise to when we were going trying to find you know biologists or English faculty there are these workshops that were recruiting workshops became particularly important because they were a mechanism for identifying people and I don't you know this was all pre-pandemic and I don't know exactly what those would look like now because you had to get you had to get people together where they were they were two and a half days long when we did them face-to-face workshops and that was short enough people would come but long enough that people got to know each other well enough to have these teams start to gel and ideas start to gel and I don't know if you can get people to come for two and a half days anymore you know you'd have to really think about you know what the what the equivalent there is or what the when you did your call for proposals that was so you had a large NSF grant that you secured and then you did a call for proposals within the scope of work for your funded NSF grant so you got you got funding to go out and do this so you had a sponsor that's we had 10 million dollars that had to be five years I mean and not just for the materials development the whole program was a 10 million no that's great and I was just wondering how whether you did that call for proposals before you applied for NSF or you had the idea posed it to NSF and then you did the call for proposals as the scope of work yeah this was unusual because NSF came out with this 10 I think this was a congressional earmark in all honesty came out with this one time 10 million dollar center proposal they were step centers there were only two awarded one in geoscience one in engineering they were looking for one in biology and didn't make an award and you know so lots of money really fast burn time and we use that we use that to do both the the curriculum development and then also the institutional adaptations of it so it was sort of a two and and the development of a large dissemination campaign so it was a sort of three scale program that's all written up in the about this project uh part of the website oh there it is yeah perfect and and actually so there was a huge lift involved in developing so a hundred faculty over a little over a hundred faculty were involved in the curriculum development project and that was more faculty that you had to have a system to manage that many not sure faculty writing modules and so that system was a big lift to develop and it's now being used by other projects so you now code the get see project is doing applications using the same curriculum development strategy not as much as much money so they're not paying their people as much so they've skinny to down but they're also producing modules using pretty much the same you know the same strategy of of of developing faculty teams having a evaluation structure that leads to the revision of the materials and then publishes them online and then this one this is another project that's using the same sort of infrastructural approach and and this one is business and science so it's from it's led out of Bentley University and it integrates across the business school and the science school so that's so you know that's something to think about is that you don't have to invent it all from scratch I know that we are ending our 30 minutes it passes so fast um any other last minute comments from um the committee members Kathy any parting words from you as we continue our quest to gather information in this area I'm happy to you know I'm happy to talk with you further I think this is only one strategy I tried to think about sort of the sort of bigger picture and of course geoscience has been trying to raise its profile forever as are all the little parts of geoscience which I would include you and call you a little part but I called you a part and um you know and I there I think that and connecting to the workforce if I was going to do this again the thing that we didn't do explicitly that I would would do is to so the materials had a there were five guiding principles and all appear materials had to meet them you can find those on the website but they had to address an societal issue they had to develop habits of mind they had to develop complex systems thinking so there are five of those and we that's what we evaluated against I would have made one of them explicitly I would have made six and made one of them connections to the workforce so that that really came through um more explicitly that's a that's a great learning lesson so and then I also would I mean I another strategy I think is worth really thinking about is is just going straight after the workforce connections and thinking about how internships are engaging with um you know what are the internship what if you start with a physics student or a or a ocean sciences student or a different kind of student as an undergraduate what what how do you make a path that goes to an internship so they get to or a research experience that um bill you know adds enough to their major or subs in the stuff in their major so that they're prepared for that internship and give them an opportunity to really try ocean acoustics early on relatively early on before their graduate student so thank you um I thank you for spending this time with us and trying to respect your time and the time of the committee members but I always leave with this thought if you're driving home or cooking dinner tonight and think about oh I should have said this or I should have turned them on to this website please get in touch with me or anyone on the committee or at the academies and just drop us a quick note we're always happy to discuss more and especially this has been so helpful I've taken two full pages of notes the things that um that I found it's just inspirational that we could we could learn from um and thank you for putting the the websites in there that's something that we can continue to go back to and see in writing so I appreciate that also um but mostly just thank you for doing what you do what what you're doing is hard and um geosciences as a whole I hope they appreciate all of your effort because I certainly know that it's not easy and hearing about everything that you've been involved in um yeah you've got accolades for me I hope we can do half as good of job here with the ocean acoustics community well I'm sure you can and I wish you every success so thank you all it was fun to talk with you thanks Kathy thank you nice bye bye bye bye bye