The Concept of In Situ Lecturing

Abstract

Traditional teaching at university level takes place mainly in lecture rooms without any direct linkage to the real subject. Thus even during well taught lectures the human, in our case students’, multi-sense receptivity is stimulated only in a limited way. This means that just a part of the actual subject matter can be transferred. Therefore, students will not learn to observe the whole range of the circumstances and environmental parameters involved in a specific subject. This problem arises especially in natural sciences and, partly, engineering teaching in which the environmental setting is often a key to successfully understand complex processes, proportions and scales as well as human (counter) actions. In our concept “in situ lecturing†we teach at the place which is being studied, hence “in situâ€. In situ lecturing is a valuable pedagogical concept to develop student’s understanding of basic concepts, to enable them to transfer concepts and theory to local conditions, to train practical skills and to promote a comprehensive understanding of processes. This approach is achieved by an integrative combination of pre-courses and practicals in the classroom, followed by in situ lectures, practicals and seminars as well as a final reporting. Examples are presented from geophysics but these may be transferred to many other disciplines.