Professor of Geosciences Barbara Tewksbury delivered the commencement address at Virginia Tech's Department of Geosciences graduation ceremony on May 10. The title of her address was "Insights from Apollo for Teaching and Learning Geoscience in the 21st Century."
Her talk explored how NASA pilot astronauts were trained in the 1960s to do good field geology on the Moon and how the training was both very much ahead of its time and consistent with what cognitive scientists have documented since about how people learn. She talked about how geoscientists can take what worked and what didn't work and apply it to how they teach geology to students in the classroom, lab and field.
Her talk explored how NASA pilot astronauts were trained in the 1960s to do good field geology on the Moon and how the training was both very much ahead of its time and consistent with what cognitive scientists have documented since about how people learn. She talked about how geoscientists can take what worked and what didn't work and apply it to how they teach geology to students in the classroom, lab and field.
