It would make sense for Luke Zoet’s favorite class to be the one that travels to Iceland for an adventurous glacier study. Or you might suspect that the Dean L. Morgridge Associate Professor of Geoscience’s ideal lecture is Geology of the National Parks — a course so popular, it attracts hundreds of auditors each year.
But no.
The class Zoet looks forward to most each semester is Geomorphology, which is all about explaining the intricate, curious landscape of … Wisconsin. The class does have field trips, but they start locally in Madison then head west to the driftless area with stops at Wyalusing State Park and Cave of the Mounds — never leaving the Badger State.
“Wisconsin is really nice because everything is right here,” Zoet says. “I always tell people, I have students going to all of these crazy places [like New Zealand and Antarctica], but I’d rather just be digging holes in the dirt around here because that’s the thing I’m interested in.”
He’s referring to the rich geological significance of the state, thanks in part to the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and the varied landscapes carved out by glaciers. To teach on the subject, he splits the class into four main categories: rivers, glaciers, mass wasting (landslides and hill/slope processes) and the coastline.
“My main learning objective for the students in the class is that I want them to be able to tell me why Wisconsin looks the way that it does,” Zoet says. “What is going on with these hills here? What is going on with this coastline here? What is going on with these caves over here? What is going on with these rivers over here? All those things have to be covered in this class.”
But just because the class is close to home doesn’t mean it’s easy. Zoet’s former student Cam Shepherd (’21) remembers being surprised at the technical challenges involved.
“It was kind of difficult. There were concepts like physics, and there was definitely a lot of math involved,” Shepherd says. “But he structured it in a way where it felt like it was more of a discussion in a smaller group that felt very open.”
That’s part of Zoet’s teaching philosophy, to make his classes as collaborative as possible. He won’t move on from the fundamentals until his students make it clear they understand, and he’ll spend more time teaching on subjects that have sparked the students’ curiosity, taking the time to answer extra questions that encourage class discussion. Because of this, his class looks different semester to semester. This interactive format might explain why his teaching scores are so high every semester — even getting a perfect score a couple years in a row — despite the fact that the class is technically challenging.
“The classes I teach are probably the most difficult in terms of connecting different concepts together and using that knowledge to try to work through new problems,” Zoet says. “I’ve had a lot of feedback at the end of the class that, ‘This is the most difficult class I’ve ever taken, but it’s also the best class I’ve ever taken.’”
For Shepherd, the class was also an opportunity to learn more about his home state. Even though he took the course three years ago, he still likes to tell people about the fact that the Wisconsin River had a reversal and used to flow in the opposite direction. It’s a tidbit he learned in Zoet’s classroom.
“I know more about the area and its history,” Shepherd says. “Some [Wisconsinites] don’t know why there are rolling hills in the farmland, and the class taught me exactly how the physical processes behind the formation of these landscapes worked.”
I’ve had a lot of feedback at the end of the class that, ‘This is the most difficult class I’ve ever taken, but it’s also the best class I’ve ever taken.’
And there’s still a lot to learn about Wisconsin’s geological features. In fact, Geomorphology is the class that has most inspired and informed Zoet’s research. For years, he’s been studying the physics of how glaciers move and the processes of building landforms. But teaching Geomorphology has also inspired him to dig into another subject: coastal erosion, specifically along the Great Lakes.
“A lot of times, [a class] sparks my interest in a topic,” Zoet says. “Part of the class is trying to understand how coastlines evolve, and to do that you have to learn a lot of the processes that drive coastlines to evolve. People ask me questions like, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ and ‘Oh, what’s that?’ I thought, I can actually take a stab at trying to answer these types of questions.”
Now, he and a team of researchers with the Department of Geoscience are looking at bluff erosion and sediment movement at two Wisconsin coastal points, Port Washington and Point Beach State Forest. He hopes his research will eventually be used to help provide guidance on shore protection and bluff stabilization.
“When people think of geoscience, they think of rocks. Like, ‘What’s this rock?’ And that’s certainly a big component of it, but that’s only half of geoscience,” Zoet says. “The other side is trying to look at processes and how things work on the surface of the Earth …. They’re just trying to gather that information from the rocks whereas in Geomorphology we can, a lot of the time, just observe the processes directly.”
