INTERDISCIPLINARY TRAVEL STUDY EXPERIENCE FOR UNDERGRADUATES TO BELIZE, CENTRAL AMERICA

Students can learn to identify earth materials and basic principles from laboratory study and classroom lectures, usually supplemented with visual aids, but field relationships are often more complex and more challenging. Many undergraduate courses include “token” field experiences amounting to passive, guided, sight seeing trips, while others are more interactive requiring the student to conduct some basic research using data collected in the field. Most trips are local (one-day) or within traveling distance feasible in a weekend; undergraduate international experience is rare. At UT Martin, a small rural undergraduate university, we developed an interdisciplinary, yearly 6 credit-hour international travel study course integrating geology, archaeology, and biology with geography’s travel and tourism concentration. We spend 12 days in Belize, Central America, with side trips to Guatemala (Tikal), and Mexico (Quintanaroo). Students conduct background research on topics serving as “resident expert” on that topic on the trip, where they supplement their research with information they gather first hand, turning in an expanded research paper and daily journal for grading. Topics include: Mayan archaeology, modern ecotourism, stromatolites, impact processes, tectonics and structural geology, reef ecology, paleoenvironmental reconstruction, modern carbonate environments, mangrove ecology, island formation, hurricanes, Civil War ex-patriotism. Several publishable multi-year geology projects have emerged from the course, including study of stromatolites from the Laguna Bacalar region of Mexico, calcite overgrowths on the Mayan food snail Pachychilus from Chechem Ha, mapping of the extent of the Chicxulub impact ejecta blanket, and carbonate environment studies on Caye Caulker.