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All: 

Most of you already know that the Journal of Geoscience Education is 
transitioning to a new editorial team. If you haven't heard, Joe Elkins and 
I will be sharing the Editorship as Co-Editors. 

I am emailing today in my capacity as Co-Editor for Production. JGE has a 
planned special issue on Thinking and Learning with a deadline of Dec. 31, 
2008. We already have several submissions for this issue, and we would like 
to get a rough estimate of how many more manuscripts we should expect. If 
you are planning to submit to this special issue, please send me an email 
(offlist, to [log in to unmask]). A brief description of the special issue is 
pasted below. 

Thanks for your help! Your response will allow us to plan for this special 
issue as we simultaneously work on publishing the Jan. 2008 issue. Please 
feel free to forward this message to interested colleagues, as well. 

Sincerely,
Julie 

Julie Libarkin
Co-Editor for Production, JGE
JGE email: [log in to unmask]
Libarkin email: [log in to unmask] 

Special Issue Synopsis
How does the human mind learn to understand something as big, as 
four-dimensional, as old, and as complicated as the Earth System? Geoscience 
educators grapple with this question every day. Like other humans, our 
students have minds that evolved to perceive, reason about, and make 
judgments about phenomena within the pre-literate human and hominid life 
experience. In geoscience classes, we ask our students to apply those minds 
to Earth and environmental phenomena that are bigger, smaller, faster, 
slower, farther in the past, farther in future, more complex, and 
encountered through representations as well as through direct perception. 
Students find this hard, and we sometimes find it hard to help them. 
Research on thinking and learning can help. 

This special issue seeks contributions that bring insights from cognitive 
and learning sciences to bear on the challenges of thinking, learning, and 
teaching about the Earth and environment.