"THANK YOU FOR THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE"

During the summer of 2001, the University of Minnesota, Morris, a 2000-student, all undergraduate, liberal arts campus of the University of Minnesota, hosted TIMES II (“Teaching Inquiry-based Minnesota Earth Science”). This was the second in a series of two-week-long summer programs supported by the Science Museum of Minnesota and was intended to infuse inquiry-based field investigations into the secondary school earth science curriculum. As an outgrowth of TIMES II, we embarked upon a professional learning/teaching collaboration that, to date, has included two day-long bus trips with 8th grade earth science students to collect and study sharks’ teeth, and a 5-day field trip to points of geological, ecological, cultural and historical interest in southwestern Minnesota and South Dakota. We believe that our success to date, as documented in highly positive feedback from students, teachers, school administrators, and parents, reflects: 1) collaboration between two teachers who are committed, in the most fundamental of ways, to learning by doing, i.e., learning by inquiry; 2) participation of a college faculty member who was “familiar with the territory”, i.e., has had extensive (>20 years) experience with organizing and running field trips; 3) co-participation of a secondary school earth science teacher, who was similarly “familiar with the territory” - in this case the territory populated by 8th grade students from a rural high school in west-central Minnesota; 4) the open and enthusiastic support of school administrators and teachers, including the local school board, the school’s superintendent, high school principal, and the teachers themselves; 5) the generosity and support of the community - from a local sportsmen's club that pledged $2000 worth of support following a visit by two of the 8th graders one afternoon - to parents who, working together, donated most of the food required to keep our army of 62 8th graders, 6 parent chaperones, and 9 UMM student assistants well fed during those five days of field investigations. That we succeeded in ways that we might have wished for but simply could never have anticipated was brought home to us on the afternoon of the second day of the trip when, during a stop in Badlands National Park, one of the 8th graders came up to us and said “Thank you for the best day of my life”