Sand is essentially the most extracted commodity on the earth.Credit score: Marco Longari/AFP by way of Getty
We began our school positions in Canada after spending two years as postdocs in the USA. On the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was winding down and in-person actions had been slowly returning to regular.
On this section of our careers at McGill College in Montreal (the place M.B., a geographer, began working in 2021, adopted a yr later by her husband, L.I., a biologist), we observed that college students appeared hesitant to interact throughout courses and had been typically reluctant to strategy us.
This felt like a stark distinction to our PhD research in Denmark, wherein college students and college members interacted extra casually, calling professors by their first identify or just knocking on their door to ask questions.
We observed an analogous reticence from college students looking for to affix our laboratories as analysis assistants. We puzzled whether or not, after years of learning in isolation (a few of them, like us, new to the nation), the scholars had been reluctant to interact informally with each friends and instructors.
To draw their curiosity and inject some informality, in March 2022, we launched SandClub; an interdisciplinary journal membership targeted on world sand shortage.
Sand is the world’s most extracted commodity and most-used pure useful resource after water. Along with gravel and crushed stone, it’s a key ingredient in fashionable societies, as a result of it goes into concrete and glass. But, its extraction stays largely unregulated and continues to be an understudied matter.
We felt {that a} journal membership can be an ideal place to begin elevating consciousness of the necessary problem, and supply an informal, welcoming group for college students from all backgrounds and disciplines.
We puzzled whether or not the identify was too provocative, as a result of it builds off the 1999 cult film Battle Membership, wherein a disillusioned essential character establishes a hidden and unique brotherhood via a combat membership. However with a witty spin, our level was the precise reverse: ‘First rule of SandClub: you speak about SandClub’.
At first, we adopted a traditional journal-club format — studying and discussing related and not too long ago printed articles. We shortly realized that college students needed extra than simply paper critiques, however we had been cautious to not add extra extracurricular work to their plates. We surveyed the membership and had been shocked to be taught that many certainly needed shows and alternatives to undertake analysis themselves.
Consequently, we expanded the main target to incorporate broader sedimentary processes and impacts of local weather change, and pivoted SandClub in the direction of more-participatory actions. Individuals have described how they now really feel extra assured talking up at school settings, and that it has given them a greater understanding of what typically looks like a ‘black field of analysis’; they’ve developed critical-thinking expertise and learnt to analyse knowledge and overview manuscripts. Some 3 years in, we’ve got run 25 journal-club classes, involving greater than 60 college students from 5 schools, coming from greater than 30 majors. SandClub sometimes is held twice a month in the course of the semester with about 10–15 attendees, and we carry loads of snacks. At first, the afternoon conferences conflicted with our younger son’s schedule, so we simply introduced him alongside. At occasions, he participated within the dialogue, at others, he completed homework, generally helped by a number of of the scholars. Their interactions helped to create a relaxed ambiance, and bolstered the concept academia doesn’t must be inflexible — it may be a group wherein all are welcome.
We heard that college students admire the open ambiance for dialog and studying. One described that the “virtually horizontal relationship” between college students and professors as “one thing they’d not skilled elsewhere on the college throughout their research”. This casual and non-hierarchical relationship helps us to foster a the type of ambiance and studying surroundings wherein college students flourish.
We expanded the format and actions in response to pupil suggestions and the rising curiosity, providing actions that may very well be included of their CVs. For instance, when requested to overview papers, we now ask editors whether or not we will share the manuscript with SandClub members, enabling college students to formally take part within the reviewing course of. We incorporate a few of their feedback in our critiques, together with for papers in Nature Geoscience and Nature Sustainability. We replace the scholars on manuscript choices and hope that, by demystifying the peer-review and publishing course of, the scholars are uncovered to this typically hidden side of analysis, serving to them to know how analysis strikes from draft to publication.
A SandClub session, at McGill College in Montreal, Canada.Credit score: Mette Bendixen
We have now been impressed by their capability to assume critically about complicated matters round sand shortage. With pupil backgrounds spanning geography, biology and the surroundings, anthropology, engineering and political science, it’s useful for us as reviewers to get views that we would not have considered. And college students say that it has deepened their respect for this prolonged, typically tedious strategy of analysis publishing and peer overview, and proven them that their voice issues.