STEM Education Institute Tuesday Seminar
Michele Cooke of the UMass Amherst Department of Geosciences will present "Use your hands! Geologic Classroom and Field Activities with Deaf High School Students."
From Michele Cooke: "Over the past five years I've worked with earth science teachers at seven schools for the deaf around the country to develop new classroom curricula to demonstrate the geologic processes of mountain building. The deformation sandbox gets students observing, measuring, discussing, interpreting and predicting granular deformation. Students also discover the utility of models to understand the large-scale and slow processes that occur within the earth. To reinforce the analogy to geologic deformation, I've run three field trips for teachers and selected students to Utah (2005), Western New England (2006) and southern California (2008). On these trips the students visit exposures of geologic faulting and folding and learn to see the world as geologists do. What I enjoy most about teaching these students is their excellent observational and spatial thinking skills honed by the use of American Sign Language (ASL) as their primary language. ASL uses a spatial grammar that is adept at describing and discussing the three-dimensional relationships of geologic deformation. The same skills that structural geologists are trained for: 1) detailed observation and pattern recognition, 2) three-dimensional visualization, 3) developing dynamic image in their minds, are also skills that signers use every day."