I attended the science talks during the Grand Canyon Hiking GTS on February 15, 2019. My big takeaway from the seminar was that the guides and visitors love the Grand Canyon deeply and yet the wildlife, forests, and landscape face more challenges now than ever.  Climate is changing, water resources are increasingly scarce, helicopters and planes regularly disturb wildlife, and dedicated park scientists and managers work with limited staff and funding!  Another takeaway was that the guides and visitors love the Canyon and support it through contributions to the Grand Canyon Conservancy.

I captured as much information as I could during the short talks in these sketchnotes about the forests of the Kaibab Plateau (Dr. Peter Fulé), Grand Canyon soundscapes, karst hydrogeology (and caves), bison on the North Rim (GRCA Science and Resrouce Management Division), and Grand Canyon maps (Matthew Toro).  Enjoy!

What is the Hiking GTS?
The Grand Canyon Conservancy (formerly the Grand Canyon Association) hosts a Guide Training Seminar each year at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. The Hiking GTS is takes place in mid-February and is geared towards hiking guides, tour bus operators, and people who lead backpacking trips in the canyon.  It is distinct from the slightly better known River GTS, which is hosted by the Grand Canyon River Guides Association so it is geared towards river guides and takes place at the Hatch River Expeditions warehouse in mid-March. 

It seems like everyone I meet these days is talking about the NSA - National Speakers Association - so when past president Kristin Arnold invited me to attend the Arizona Chapter meeting this week, I went for it!

Kate Delaney, the Sports Princess, spoke about finding your WOW.  I would boil her message down into these essential elements:

• Use sassy titles that will catch your audience's attention.  Descriptive, boring, academic titles don't work anymore.  People are too busy to figure out what you have to offer, so you must tell them.
• Work on your pitch until it is clear, concise and catchy!  Keep your pitch to a couple of paragraphs and be sure that it says who you are, what you do, and what you have to offer.
• Catch the news cycle with earned, rented and owned content. Kate uses the metaphor of a stadium and says the goal is to get people inside of your stadium where your own media resides.
  • Earned media.  This is media that finds you because of the wonderful (or possibly scandalous) things that you have to offer.  You can catch more earned media by writing and speaking about topics that are timely and newsworthy (i.e. what are you posting for Valentine's Day this year?)
  • Rented media.  These are media bits that you post on other sides and possibly pay to promote, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.  This media catches a large audience, but because you don't own it, it could all vanish if the platform goes away or you lose access.   
  • Owned media.  This is your website, your blog, your podcast.  You want to get as many people in the door of your stadium because here you own the team and you can dazzle people with your talent!

When people talk about learning styles, they often refer to people who prefer to learn from visual information (i.e., drawings, photographs, diagrams, and illustrations) and people who prefer to learn from verbal information (i.e., spoken words, written stories, and text-based instructions).  Hence the suggestion of two learning styles: “visualizer” and “verbalizer”.  These two styles have received a lot of attention from academic researchers, parenting journals, and Facebook quizzes, but they are only two among dozens of learning styles have been described over the years (e.g., Myers-Briggs, Kolb’s Learning Styles, Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, etc.).  It seems to give people reassurance when they believe they know how they learn best.  Parents are also drawn to the idea that if their children are taught in their preferred learning style, they will do better in school and go on to live more successful lives.  However, the science suggests that it is not this simple (1).

Educational psychologists have documented that people do indeed prefer visual or verbal information and to some degree these preferences are related to their cognitive ability with visual or verbal information (2).  Scientists determine someone’s preference by giving them a quiz that asks questions like: “when you read science lab manual, do you prefer to look at the diagrams or read the text?”  Once they know a person’s preferred style, they can validate that preference by offering them the choice of multiple types of information (i.e. diagrammatic or text-based help on a quiz) and determining if their choices match their preference (1).

Once researchers demonstrate that people reliably prefer one type of information over another, they need to figure out if people learn better in an environment that emphasizes the type of information that they prefer (3).  This distinction – switching from identifying the information I prefer to the information that helps me learn – is what separates a learning preference from a learning style.  Researchers call this the “meshing hypothesis” and is the most common way to test for the existence of learning styles (4).

Tests of the meshing hypothesis have come up empty-handed.  Students do not score better on quizzes after they have been taught in their preferred style (5, 6).  In one study, the researchers found that all learners performed slightly better on a quiz about lightning formation when they were presented with visual information, regardless of their learning preference.  It seems that students can adapt to accommodate any type of information presentation.

While there is not much scientific support for the meshing hypothesis, there is support for the idea that the teaching method should match the content being taught (7).  For example, how effective would it be to teach:

• color theory using only verbal descriptions and text? 
• knot-tying using only diagrams and illustrations? 
• dancing with photographs and written descriptions of people doing dance moves?

 
The idea of learning styles is very compelling because it speaks to our human desire to understand ourselves and be understood.  However, it is important to understand the difference between preferring visual information and learning more effectively from visual information because if you believe too strongly that you need visual information to learn, you could miss out on a lot of exciting ideas that are best described in only in words!