Faculty/Graduate Student Collaborative Workshop at the DMC Workshop Theme: Ocean-Climate Connections

Held at the Darling Marine Center in Walpole, ME Friday, January 29, 2010 and Monday through Tuesday, February 1-2, 2010

The Faculty-Graduate Student Collaborative workshop featured 17 graduate students and post-doc students. With backgrounds in marine policy, oceanography, marine biology, ecology and environmental sciences, this group was a diverse cross section of students at different stages in their academic careers. The participants also came in with different levels of education experience, with 24% of them having no prior teaching experience, and the rest having a mix of formal and informal experience.


Prior to the workshop, we polled participants to ascertain whether they were familiar with concept mapping, a core component of the collaborative workshop. Seventy one percent of the students had used concept mapping before (which may be due to the fact that some School of Marine Sciences courses use it as a learning tool). What was interesting about this group as well was that they had also used concept mapping in a variety of ways before coming to the workshop, including to organize their ideas, study, or to plan their thesis.