Barbara Bekken

Barbara Bekken is a part-time non-tenure track faculty member in Geosciences who held a contract appointment with the Provost's Office from 2006-10 to direct the Earth Sustainability Integrative Liberal Education Program. She holds graduate degrees in Ore Deposits Geology and Geochemistry (PhD Stanford '90) and Metamorphic Petrology (MS U Washington '80) but has dedicated her career to studying how undergraduate students know and learn. Specifically, her academic interests have delved into evaluating how various pedagogical approaches and curricular designs promote increasingly sophisticated personal theories of learning and knowing. Working closely with an interdisciplinary team of scholars, she designed and helped teach three cohorts of first and second year students who participated in the experimental Earth Sustainability Integrative Liberal Education Program's two-year interdisciplinary and wholly integrative curriculum designed to fulfill Virginia Tech's general education requirements and AACU's Essential Learning Outcomes. Her recent research has focused on evaluating student learning outcomes from the Earth Sustainability series to discern which practices were most effective in creating sophisticated integrative thinkers with the skills and motivation to become lifelong learners.