THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA INTERDISCIPLINARY FIELD PROGRAM: AN TIME-TESTED APPROACH TO INTERDISCIPLINARY FIELD-BASED GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION

The University of Georgia's Interdisciplinary Field Program is now in its 16th year of operation. This rigorous summer field program offers introductory honors courses in anthropology, ecology, and geology for undergraduates of any major. As the name suggests, this summer program takes an interdisciplinary approach to teaching the subjects offered, while providing the ultimate in field experiences; the program is also an eight-week camping/road trip across the United States. The UGA-IFP uses inquiry-based methods of instruction to facilitate learning in environments that represent many of the fundamentals of science education. For example, the Grand Canyon serves as the "textbook" for lessons in historical geology, field mapping of stratigraphic units, and desert ecology. The Interdisciplinary Field Program utilizes the enormous diversity of terrains, bioregions, and cultures in the United States as an instructional tool. Students can earn up to 15 hours of semester credit, including credit for a lab science sequence and environmental and multicultural literacy. The program also offers advanced course credit for subject majors who are interested in participating. Course work is intensive; a typical day in the field runs from 7 AM until 5 PM. This time is spent mapping, touring, attending roadside and site specific lectures, discussing, experimenting, hiking, and collecting samples for further study/comparison in camp. Students are encouraged to read assigned literature on the stop before they arrive, whether it is for anthropology, geology, or ecology (or all three), and then make their own observations and record them in their field notebooks. Then, inquiry-based discussions are led to encourage students to interpret outcrops, archaeological sites, museums, or ecosystems. The field experiences are followed by instruction from the faculty in the form of lectures and lab assignments. Students benefit tremendously from the hands-on experience; rather than being told explicitly what a site "means" they are encouraged to make their own interpretations, which the entire group analyzes, assisted by the expertise of the program's staff. This program enhances the fundamentals of each discipline while encouraging students to explore their own ideas about a subject and how it relates to other fields of study.