Teach Soils

Links to K-12 soil teaching projects and college soils courses. Emphasis is on support resources for teachers seeking to increase awareness of soil resources. From the bookmark files of the National Society of Consulting Soil Scientists.

• SSSA - Soil Science Lessons - Soils Education Resources for Everyone. Breathtakingly comprehensive and meticulously organized list of sites.
• Discovery Education's The Dirt on Soil. An NSCSS favorite, especially Soil Safari.
• The Globe Programme: Why Study Soils (PDF). The best teacher's guide we've found.
• NASA - Soil Science Education. One of the first soil science education sites, this resource set the tone and the high standard by which all following measure themselves.
• Michigan State University - Center for Microbial Ecology - Microbe Zoo Dirtland "Every time you walk on the ground you step on billions of microbes."
• NACD Painting with Soil (PDF) It may seem counterintuitive, but a well established fact is that great scientific thinking is often predicated in a grounding in the arts. Soil as art, and as an art medium, presents a vast and unexplored potential for learning. We need more resources like this one.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." Albert Einstein.

The more complex a problem is the more important imagination becomes in understanding it. The complex interdependencies that determine soil behavior make modeling soil functions particularly difficult. For a student to appreciate the study of soils, imagination is often more important than knowledge.

Imagine our planet without soils. Imagine only raw parent material and lifeless dust. Sand and silt are still produced by glaciers, volcanoes and the action of water. Without microbial activity to produce soil structure, the sun would be blocked out by the blowing dust and rivers would clog with sediment. No anaerobic soil conditions would occur to produce distinctive wetlands. The continents would be dustbowls pocked with mud holes and broken by barren, rapidly eroding mountain ranges. Our deep oceans would be shallow seas filled with sediments. This was our planet before soils were formed.