THE MURIE SCIENCE AND LEARNING CENTER AND DENALI NATIONAL PARK: A PARTNERSHIP IN FIELD-BASED GEO-EDUCATION

Through partnerships with several educational organizations, the Murie Science and Learning Center (MSLC) provides innovative hands-on programs for students, teachers, families, Alaskans, and visitors for America's eight northernmost national parks. The MSLC is going on it's third year in a cooperative relationship with Denali National Park and Preserve, and has offered numerous field-based science educational opportunities, including several teacher training workshops in park geology in 2-3 day blocks of time. Housed in Denali Park, the MSLC is ideally located for quick access to a wide range of landforms, rock units, lithologies, structure, glacial features, and other geologic features and processes within the park, and has delivered several teacher training workshops utilizing these park resources.

The format of the teacher training sessions has been to provide a two-hour afternoon or early evening lecture on intro geology, park geology and glacial history, then travel to a field camp where participants are housed for the two day-long field trips. A course handbook is offered, which covers rock identification, depositional environments, stratigraphy, structure, plate tectonics, accretionary terranes, and specific guidance information on intended stops or hikes for the field activities. Along with brief roadside stops, each day has hiking options giving both higher elevations and overview of landforms, and shorter, lower level hikes with hands-on bedrock and rock identification. Evening activities involve topographic and geologic maps, air photos, and other graphic information. These MSLC courses focus primarily on pure geosciences and secondarily on classroom applications. As time and interest dictate, geo-educational activities and curriculum applications are considered.

Challenges in offering the field geology courses include the ability to provide a large amount of information in a short period of time, and flexing the information for wide-ranging geologic backgrounds, varied teacher applications, and diverse physical abilities.

The geoscience teacher workshops have been some of the more successful offerings of the MSLC programs, and expansion of courses for the 2006 field season include field seminars and teacher training workshops in Denali Park geology, paleontology, river hydrology, and glaciers.