WHAT SHOULD WE TEACH IN INTRODUCTORY METEOROLOGY? LET'S ASK THE STUDENTS!

What topics should be taught in a semester-long introductory meteorology course? For many students and instructors, this is a “given,” the answer provided by the “canon” of topics included in a standard textbook on the subject. And yet the meteorological canon is not as firm as in some other scientific fields, partly due to the youth of meteorology as a science and partly due to the continual advances in research that reshape our understanding of the subject. When we collaborated on an introductory meteorology textbook (Ackerman and Knox 2003) we discovered that there was less consensus on the canon than we expected. We were not provided with a list of mandatory topics by our publisher, for example. Instead, we compiled a “consensus” list of topics in most or all introductory texts, and then modified the list based on our experiences as instructors and scientists. Who is left out of the canon-making effort? The students. To our knowledge, students are almost always “out of the loop” when it comes to curriculum design in our field. Faculty members create the textbooks they buy, and faculty members decide which textbooks (or unpublished notes) are used in their classes. Faculty members usually set the syllabi for their courses. Students may have opportunity to comment on the design of the syllabus and/or the utility of the text in an end-of-semester evaluation, which may have some impact on future curriculum decisions. But in our experience, faculty usually call the shots based primarily on their own views and interests. Curriculum design in meteorology is a very “top-down” process. Does curriculum design