UNDERGRADUATES AS COMMUNICATORS OF LOCAL GEOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN A SEDIMENTOLOGY AND STRATIGRAPHY COURSE

General geology textbooks used in high schools have a global or national audience, and thus do not incorporate opportunities for hands-on local scientific inquiry that greatly benefit the learning experience. University geoscientists with expertise in local geology can disseminate knowledge to high schools, but must balance such outreach with other responsibilities of their position. Here we introduce a strategy for leveraging teaching time, whereby professors and students can work together in an undergraduate course to create resources that are useful to the larger community. Undergraduate students are rapidly building expertise early in their geoscience careers and they have an innate appreciation for non-expert understanding of their discipline. They especially have an appreciation for the impact of jargon on communication of concepts. Additionally, the process of communicating fundamental concepts aids in the learning process.

We present a model project for integrating undergraduate learning and outreach through the creation of a local field guide resource that is designed to be accessible to high school students and teachers. The project was a semester-long written outreach project for an upper level sedimentology and stratigraphy class. Students worked in groups to produce a guidebook with the following parts; a short general overview of the geological history of Wisconsin, an important problem in sedimentary geology addressed by research in the area, a field guide to looking at outcrops in the area, and a summary of a societally relevant problem related to the local geology. Students reviewed relevant literature, observed outcrops in the field, and spent extensive time writing as groups. Further development of this outreach-as-learning approach may lead to more extensive dissemination of results from the geoscience literature, and summarized local knowledge from professional field work.