What is it about?
As a practicing civil engineer up to the age of 50, I became aware that there were shortcoming in what I was taught about soil mechanics in my undergraduate course, and when I became a lecturer at Auckland University I thought more about this topic and wrote a couple of papers about it that were presented at seminars on teaching soil mechanics. The above paper grew out of a very interesting and positive discussion I had with Professor Carlos Santamarina of KAUST university in Jedda (formerly of Georgia Politech). In a way my paper was a response to the paper of Professor Santamarina
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Why is it important?
The paper addresses a number of important issues in the teaching of soil mechanics. The paper is about technical issues, not about teaching methods or syllabus content. One very important issue is that soil mechanics courses restrict their teaching to sedimentary soils and rarely mention residual soils. The result is that graduates routinely apply concepts to residual soils that are only valid for sedimentary soils
Perspectives
I began my career after graduation working in the soil mechanics section of the Indonesia Public Works Department. The soils I got involved with much of the time were residual soils of volcanic origin. I discovered that significant parts of the soil mechanics that I learnt at university were not applicable to these soils. If you search the literature you will find papers in Geotechnique from about 1974 describing volcanic soils in Java. And I have written a number of papers since then. One thing I learnt from residual soils was that plotting compression data using a log scale was wrong, and I learnt discovered also that it routinely gave a wrong impression when applied to sedimentary soils
Laurence Wesley
University of Auckland
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Short communication: (What) To teach or not to teach – from theory to practice, Geotechnical Research, December 2015, ICE Publishing,
DOI: 10.1680/jgere.15.00005.
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