Gillian Stewart is a professor at Queens College dedicated to teaching oceanography and environmental science to diverse undergraduate students.
Norton’s introductory oceanography text, Oceanography: An Interdisciplinary Approach, is making it easier than ever to teach the ocean as a dynamic system, instead of siloed buckets of chemistry, geology, physics, and biology.
Author Gillian Stewart is passionate about drawing connections across these ocean disciplines, to the students’ lives, and to climate change. In this interview with the Norton Geology team, she explores how this new textbook came to be and how she knows it’s one that students will actually read.
Q: Could you introduce yourself?
A: I was inspired to become an oceanographer during my freshman year of college, when I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I ended up taking an introductory oceanography class at Harvard with Joe Montoya, and I wanted to be him. He made the ocean so incredibly exciting—even the parts outside of marine biology.
I have been teaching for a long time, over twenty years: at Queens College, Suffolk Community College, and Harvard. I did my PhD at Stony Brook, and my research—still—is using natural uranium series radionuclides to study the carbon cycle in the open ocean. I mostly study the open ocean away from the coasts, and I am really interested in the biological pump.
Q: Why did you decide to write this book?
A: It goes back to people asking me what I love about oceanography. My answer is always the same—there are huge discoveries to be made in oceanography. The interdisciplinary nature always really excited me, too. I’m intrigued by the idea that you must understand the chemistry, physics, geology, and biology and how they work together as a system.
Having taught introductory oceanography for twenty years now, I reflected on the books that already exist. They are divided by those four disciplines, and they save marine life and humans for the end. I think particularly for introductory, nonmajor students, sparking the intellectual curiosity of how the world works around them is so important. I struggled teaching with traditional books because by Chapter 8 or 9, I’ve lost half of my students. They’re wondering, “Where are the whales and turtles?” I thought it would be exciting to write a book that is interdisciplinary in the way that it connects the ocean constantly to humans and to the students (and their interests!). I also think this approach engages students because it shows how science isn’t “done.”
Q: Can you explain the realms-based approach of this book?
A: The organization provides a chance to connect topics and weave the carbon cycle and climate change as through-threads in the different settings in the ocean. I got excited about the idea of dividing the ocean into areas—open ocean, deep ocean, polar ocean, coastal ocean, and atmosphere/surface ocean. In each area, I address how the chemistry, geology, physics, and biology all interconnect and inform each other, as well as climate change and humans. The realms-based approach is the structure, and the interdisciplinary connections are the approach.
I had never been taught about the polar or deep oceans as a student and felt like they always got very little coverage in traditional textbooks. I love that my book exposes students to those very important areas in the ocean while still maintaining the traditional classroom learning objectives. It’s hard for students to not get excited about the alien-looking creatures in the deep ocean! It helps students understand the ocean as a system and how that system interacts with our own lives.
Q: You integrate coverage of climate change throughout the book. Can you give an example?
A: It’s hard for me to think about the ocean without thinking about the carbon cycle. The ocean is the lungs of the planet. When students are learning about climate change, they know the ocean is part of it, but they don’t necessarily know how. In the coastal ocean section, we talk about coral reefs and how climate change is indirectly involved in their decline. When we’re talking about tides, we tie in sea-level rise and thermal expansion. We also discuss how coastal communities deal with climate change.
Everywhere that I can, I connect back to climate change and humans without being super preachy or too depressing. The book also highlights the fact that even though the deep ocean doesn’t have seasons or days, it is the biggest ecosystem on the planet, and the sediment is the place where all the carbon accumulates. Examples like that—that students don’t think about—are in there.
Q: What connections stand out for students who don’t live near the ocean?
A: I touch on seasons; weather and climate; rare earth elements in their cellphones; salt and the uses of it beyond our food; diatomaceous earth and all the things it’s been used for, like filtering beer. There’s a section on what you should order for dinner and the difference between farmed and wild caught fish. In the atmosphere section, there’s an “Oceanography in Everyday Life” feature that explores if the weather impacts students’ grades. Every time I can, I’m linking it back to the students.
We also know getting students to read textbooks can be challenging, so I wanted to write in a casual, storytelling voice that makes it feel like they’re making connections along with me. Someone taught me that you should pause and take a breath when you’re reading. Each chapter has multiple “Pause to Consider” boxes that ask students to consider what they think will happen next or consider the impacts of what they just learned. My hope is that this helps build better reading retention and study skills—getting them reading, thinking, and connecting information to their experiences. It’s almost like it’s written by a teacher instead of a researcher because I know firsthand the examples and anecdotes that resonate with today’s college students.
Q: How does your book address building quantitative literacy skills?
A: I have seen every math-phobic personality, and I generally don’t ask students to memorize numbers. BUT! I do want them to get a sense of scale. I want them to know when it’s kilometers and not meters, for example. Scale within the ocean is one of the most important concepts for them to learn. There’s some simple math, but I’m having them realize this isn’t doing math homework; this is solving the equation to understand the forces at play.
It’s written in a way that recognizes that most non-STEM students have a phobia of math. I want to remind them that they’re not bad at math; maybe they’ve had bad teachers or bad experiences, but it’s a language they just need to get comfortable speaking. The book acknowledges that as a scientist you deal with numbers, but it’s not about memorization. I want them to build quantitative literacy skills that they can take with them. This is also reflected in interactive activities in the ebook that deal with data and graph literacy, as well as in our online homework system, Smartwork.
Want to learn more? Watch the full interview with Gillian here!
You can also reach out to Courtney Zanosky at czanosky@wwnorton.com for more information on the book.
MEET THE AUTHOR
Gillian Stewart is a professor at Queens College dedicated to teaching oceanography and environmental science to diverse undergraduate students. She earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Harvard and a PhD from the Marine Sciences Research Center (MSRC) at Stony Brook University. Her research focuses on atmospheric carbon uptake by the surface ocean, using natural radioactive isotopes to examine the spatial and temporal variation in the efficiency of marine carbon sequestration.