What do we want students with a BS degree in Earth Sciences to know, regardless of what concentration they end up with?
What skills should they have under their belt?
How can we best prepare them for either graduate studies or for the "real" world?
Are there new approaches to teaching Earth sciences that would improve both the appreciation for our subject (and for the Earth as a whole!) and the preparation of the students?
being guided by what presently exists and by the current make-up of the faculty. Of course, these things are important; we can't teach a course if no one wants to or feels up to it. In choosing to start with a clean slate, however, we are trying to work from the student's perspective, from an ideal. In this way, we can identify serious departmental needs, whether in terms of individual faculty (e.g., a paleontologist) or in terms of methods and logistics. I'm not sure that we have succeeded in this attempt, and we would encourage each of you to shake us out of our conservatism and be radical, if only for purposes of discussion.
From one point of view, the most important (and ultimately difficult) set of courses to devise are those that are offered to students who have yet to decide a major. We can recognize two populations of students here. The first and likely largest is the group who will not become majors. We want these students to leave the introductory (gen. ed. courses) with a sense of excitement, a realization that this earth science stuff is ok! These students are important, because they spread the word to other students and they are voters. Earth Sciences needs an educated and interested lobby in the public!
The second population is the group that will become majors. For these, we need to have engaged their intellectual curiosity, to have whetted their appetite, to have shown them enough of the subject that they want to know more. The introductory core courses have been devised to acheive these goals.