The general assembly meeting of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2015 adopted the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at achieving a better and more sustainable world by 2030. Incorporating sustainable values through a series of pedagogical strategies into university curricula to help…

Critical Physical Geography (CPG) emerged as a discipline around 2014 and has since excited many human and physical geographers, as well researchers in political ecology, geomorphology, science and technology, and environmental science whose research, critiques, and methodologies have formed much of the basis of CPG. However, because of its recent…

Interacting with practitioners and understanding multiple, contradictory, and complex perspectives is an important skill for effectively managing terrestrial resources in the 21st century. Addressing these needs requires innovative approaches in higher education that elevate student learning outcomes and emphasize the affective learning domain…

Human activities such as inequitable and unsustainable production and consumption of earth resources cause "environmental problems." There is need to develop research and innovative techniques towards public understanding of these environmental problems and sustainable development. This paper contains the first edition of…

Learning styles represent an integral component of the learning environment, which has been shown to differ across institutions and disciplines. To identify learner preferences within a discipline would aid in evaluating instructional resources geared toward active learning. The learning profiles of second-year soil science students (n = 62) were…

A field-based, soil methods, and instrumentation course was developed to expose graduate students to numerous strategies for measuring soil parameters. Given the northern latitude of North Dakota State University and the rapid onset of winter, this course met once per week for the first 8 weeks of the fall semester and centered on the field as a…

Traditional soil science courses, especially with a hands-on lab component, have been face-to-face events. Several universities in the United States now offer a distance natural resources related degree, yet few have developed distance soils courses, arguably an essential part of a complete natural resource education. This article discusses the…

This study compares learning success of online and on-campus students in a general education soil science course with lab and field components. Two terms of students completed standardized pre- and postassessments designed to test knowledge and skills from the lecture and lab content of the course. There was no difference in overall grade or lab…

The laboratory component of a first-semester general chemistry course for science majors is described. The laboratory involves a semester-long project undertaken in a small-group format. Students are asked to examine whether plants grown in soil contaminated with lead take up more lead than those grown in uncontaminated soil. They are also asked…