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Working with Non-Majors

Applying 4DEE in the Classroom: Working with Non-Majors

Thursday, December 5th at 4PM ET

Are you looking for creative ways to bring the 4DEE Framework to life in your teaching? Watch Sara Scanga and Erica Tietjen’s Water Cooler Chat on exciting approaches to engaging Non-Majors with 4DEE through examining observation-based student projects.  

Presenters: Sara Scanga, Utica University & Erica Tietjen, Nevada State University

Sara Scanga: Using the 4DEE Framework to Teach Ecology to Non-Majors

Non-majors are an enormous, diverse potential ecology audience, so it is important to consider how to adapt 4DEE to create engaging instruction that is tailored to their needs and interests. Scanga briefly shares three ways in which the 4DEE Framework can be easily adapted to engage non-majors. 

  1. Non-majors instructors should feel empowered to center Human-Environment Interactions, rather than covering all of the Core Ecological Concepts. 
  2. Ecological courses are ideal for teaching Cross-Cutting Themes such as systems and spatiotemporal scales, which are relevant to many non-major disciplines. 
  3. Building non-majors’ scientific literacy requires emphasizing certain Ecological Practices (EP).

Scanga shares a few examples of how to use 4DEE to develop and teach an ecology class for non-majors and refine existing course materials for a mixed majors/non-majors’ course.  

Erica Tietjen: Take a Picture with Intention: Connecting Photographs to 4DEE Concepts and Practices using Local Resources 

Making observations that connect to core content is a foundational science practice. Learners in Tietjen’s undergraduate ecology and environmental science courses work on a semester-long project where they observe, photograph, and annotate examples of environmental terms and concepts they see while on campus, at home, in their neighborhoods, or any locations of their choosing. This project focuses on the 4DEE ecology practices (EP) of natural history and communicating and applying ecology, the human-environment interaction (HEI) elements of ecosystem services and sustainability, the cross-cutting themes (CCT) of systems thinking, scale and structure/function, and a variety of core ecological concepts (CEC). This project requires no specialized equipment or tools and gives students latitude to make personal connections that are intellectually enriching and experientially valuable and also demonstrates that science as an endeavor is accessible and for all learners.