BRINGING THE FIELD IN THE CLASSROOM: WAYS TO EXPOSE STUDENTS TO FIELD GEOLOGY WITHOUT HAVING TO LEAVE THE CAMPUS

Family and /or career obligations prevent many students in two-year colleges from participating in overnight or longer field trips. This obstacle can potentially be circumvented by creating mock field sites on campus. Such an approach was taken by Carl Campbell in designing the course Diggin' Dinosaurs. Even though this course was meant for 1-4 graders, the students were exposed to authentic field oriented research techniques by finding dinosaur bones in a sand bed, making molds and casts of the bones and identifying their finds without having to leave home for any extended period of time. Here we present various pros and cons of using this course as a possible prototype for incorporating aspects of field geology to lecture-only courses in two-year colleges.