The Vanderbilt team taught its TIES:Bangladesh course again in Spring 2014,
being co-taught by Goodbred, science-policy scientist Jonathan Gilligan, and social-justice researcher Brooke Ackerly. PIRE post-doc Carol Wilson and PhD student Jennifer Pickering also contributed to the course. Thirteen students were involved in the course, including 8 PhDs, 2 MS, and 3 undergrads. The course focused on geohazards and human-environment coupling in both the Bengal and Mississippi deltas. Due to political unrest during elections in Bangladesh, the instructors decided that it not safe to take students for the trip to Bangladesh and thus decided to do a comparison with the Mississippi delta, including issues of subsidence, sea-level rise, and tropical storms. To augment the Bangladesh course component, the instructors invited a cohort of Bangladeshi colleagues, 3 faculty and 6 students, from Dhaka and Khulna Universities to join the field trip to the Mississippi delta. The joint trip in the US was an outstanding learning experience for both sides, and US students gained tremendous insights from the Bangladeshi perspective on U.S. deltarelated engineering, hazards, and social issues. |
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