Request for Natural Hazard and Risk Perception Course Materials
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Dear colleagues,
My name is Brittany Brand. I am an Assistant Professor of Volcanology at Boise State University. I have a collegial request – would you be willing to share your natural hazard and/or risk perception exercises with us? The ‘us’ refers to our team: Pamela McMullin-Messier, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Central Washington University, and Melissa Schlegel, Geologist at College of Western Idaho, and myself.
My team and I have been awarded an InTeGrate (http://serc.carleton.edu/integrate/index.html) grant to develop a natural hazard and risk perception module, which includes mapping natural hazards and vulnerabilities within the college student’s local community, and assessing the perception of these hazards and risk and level of preparedness through a perception survey that will be distributed through the student’s social networks (i.e., friends, family, coworkers, social groups). The module will be designed to motivate students to take an active role in their learning experience by applying course materials and introducing a component of cross-disciplinary analysis that allows them to fully understand the societal relevance and importance of the course content. The primary goal is to increase the quality of student learning by engaging the students in place-based application of their knowledge to map and research local natural hazards, and to assess their community’s perception of risk and the level of preparedness from these hazards. The broad implication is that it will inherently raise community awareness. Our target audience includes non-majors and majors in courses within the disciplines of geosciences, environmental sciences, geography, and the social sciences.
Our grand scheme is to develop, test and evaluate the module over the next two years. The final materials will be provided on the SERC website and will be designed in a way that they can be implemented anywhere. We will then hold Pacific Northwest-based workshops in Idaho, Oregon and Washington to discuss how the module could be implemented, tested and further refined in your classrooms. If you are not from the PNW but would like to be involved we may be able to provide some financial support for your travel to one of our workshops. For your participation, you will also receive a stipend for implementing and testing this in your classroom. While these processes of your involvement in our project is still a bit down the road, but please stay tuned. We will keep you updated on our progress.
We recognize that many of you already have natural hazard exercises in your course(s), so we are requesting input from the educational/science community (http://serc.carleton.edu/index.html). Would you be willing to share related labs, modules or exercise with our development team? This will help us develop a high educational quality, user friendly module. Your contribution will be recognized on the SERC website when the module is finished and published. We also welcome your thoughts and comments along the way, although you are not required to participate further if you are not interested.
Thank you for your time and participation; if you have suggestions for other people to contact for involvement in our project, we would be grateful. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions.
Best regards,
Brittany
Brand -- brittanybrand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pamela
McMullin-Messier -- mcmullin@xxxxxxx
Melissa Schlegel -- melissaschlegel@xxxxxxxxxx
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Brittany D Brand, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Geosciences
Boise State University
1910 University Drive
Boise, Idaho 83725-1535
Office Phone: 208-426-4154
Website: http://earth.boisestate.edu/brittanybrand/
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