Advanced Atmospheric Dynamics

STEM education, in my view, is largely focused on training students to apply technically difficult but cognitively basic skills. Comprehension and some application of scientific concepts often form the bulk of disciplinary courses. While there is an undeniable need for creative synthesis, assessing and incorporating multiple points of view, and critical discussion of scientific concepts, the technical details strongly constrain the application of these higher cognitive skills. Technical mastery is a necessary prerequisite: students must become literate in the established fundamentals of a science before they can assess and reason in a truly critical fashion. Tools that are key to critical thinking are difficult to fit into the curriculum when the technical knowledge base that STEM students must obtain is so large and so rapidly expanding.

In this graduate level course, I try to emphasize the importance of critical assessment of the primary literature. The course is structured around weekly discussions of seminal publications in the field of atmospheric dynamics, starting with foundational work from the mid-twentieth century and building up to recently published reports and articles. Each week I give a short lecture to put the material in a broader context, after which students lead short presentations on related topics. These regular presentations give students the opportunity to read, discuss, and evaluate journal articles, and provide a more complete understanding of the logical and epistemological foundations of the field than would come from a textbook treatment that is more traditional for this topic.