Doug MacAyeal
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
teaching
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TEACHING
I love teaching and am delighted to participate in the college's "core curriculum". The courses I teach for the "core" are not for science majors or for graduate students, although my interaction with graduate students who are teaching assistants in these courses constitutes a effective way to teach my grad students about how to teach. My "Ice Age Earth" class (Physical Science 109000) has been taught for 10 years, and has become one of my mainstay activities in the Autumn. Recently, however, I have had to turn over more of the teaching of this course to my colleague, Prof. Pam Martin, and the graduate students in the department, particularly David Sunderlin. The highlight of my Ice-Age Earth class is the day-long field trip around Chicago; as I always impress the students (no matter how resistant to the material) when I show them the natural glacial landscape that underlies the city of Chicago and which has influenced its social and economic history.
Since 2003, I have taught a pair of classes entitled: "Emergence of Humankind within a Dynamic Environment" and "Settlement Systems within a Dynamic Environment" (Physci 132000 and 133000). These courses were developed in collaboration with a number of colleagues at the Oriental Institute, including archaeologists Prof. Tony Wilkinson (now at University of Edinburgh, Scotland), Jason Ur, Carrie Hritz and most recently, Prof. Jessie Cassana (now at University of Arkansas), and Young-Jin Kim, a graduate student from my department. These two classes focus on developing concrete examples of how climate change and environmental dynamism has influenced humankind's biological and cultural emergence. In essence, these two classes are a backdrop for the larger "concern" of the core curriculum: the emergence of civilization.
My teaching at the graduate level and advanced undergraduate level is based on a "tutorial" method, whereby I try as hard as possible to be as much engaged in learning as the students. Examples of this teaching include my "inverse methods" course, a course on the geophysical fluid dynamics of waves and viscous fluids, and a course on glaciology/ice-sheet modeling. Quite often, my lectures are given in a computer-enabled teaching classroom where students can get hands-on experience with numerical models and data visualization.