#BATHROOMGEOLOGY: USING SOCIAL MEDIA AND BEAUTIFUL STONEWORK TO INSPIRE STUDENT OBSERVATION AND COMMUNICATION (Invited Presentation)

Some of the most beautiful rock that anyone can really observe won't be found doing fieldwork. Instead, it constructs the walls, dividers, floors, and countertops of bathrooms around the world. When first asked to come up with an idea for this session, I happened to be in a hotel with beautiful metaconglomerate bathroom counters. Without my phone, I couldn't get a picture of the stone so I reached out to others on twitter using #bathroomgeology. The idea was born: I want to challenge my students to find, photograph, and describe the most stunning stonework in bathrooms and post it to social media. It seemed like a novel way to encourage them to make critical observations and keep the descriptions concise. In this presentation, I will show examples of responses I received with #bathroomgeology and propose how this technique could be used to engage students in looking for different rock types; identifying rock structures, textures, mineralogy, and fossils; and, interpreting their observations using geologic maps and the timescale. Furthermore, this type of project can be scaled up or down depending on the level of students.