Taxonomy in Reverse! - a Creative Window into Soil Concepts and Processes.

Undergraduate STEM students often lose or never gain an appreciation for the importance of creative activities to support skill building, learning, and knowledge discovery. Often creative activities like drawing provide an outlet from the common perception of ‘science’ and form an important bridge between abstract ideas and concrete facts. Soil and other natural sciences have a long history of drawing and other graphic forms to depict processes, properties, and landscapes. Since most properties and processes in soils are underground, introducing core ideas like profiles, horizons, mass and energy transport, aggregation, etc. often require students to make a conceptual leap to gain confidence with simple through complex subject matter and make these concepts tangible. This talk characterizes a creative activity (take home or lab) that allows students to gain familiarity with the structured soil information found in NRCS Official Series Descriptions (OSD’s) and transform these into scaled depictions of soil - taxonomy in reverse!  

The basic approach provides students with an OSD and colored pencils, with distinct features like color, rock fragment, discontinuities, etc., in a collaborative environment to work on individual drawings. The only structured requirement is for the profile and horizon depths to be accurately scaled (1”on paper = ~20 cm in situ). All other choices, which features and how to depict them, are up to the student. A majority of students (~60% - 42/70 - based on comments in reflective essays about their lab experiences) found this a very useful introduction to basic soil properties and opportunity to explore a non-traditional assignment while collaborating with peers. The most common theme was how this was a welcome ‘innocent break’ from the traditional ‘wet chemistry’ lab. This assignment and its products (student art) provide a valuable bridge into the mysteries of soil and have become a central feature of my pedagogy!

See more from this Division: SSSA Division: Soil Education and Outreach
See more from this Session: Soil Education & Outreach Oral

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