WHAT ARE THE ETHICS OF GOING INTO THE FIELD?

The practice of training students in field methods has been an essential component within the geoscience undergraduate curriculum for decades. In recent years, though, an emerging expanding dialogue has begun to challenge the entrenched value of field training in the geosciences. At issue is a fundamental question: How do students thrive in geoscience if their abilities, identities, or past experiences lead them to have reasonable doubts about maintaining their dignity and enjoying learning in the field? We observe, though, that while such a question is significant, it implicitly protects the value of field learning. The objectives of field-based pedagogy and scientific inquiry are less often examined. In this project, we are motivated by a slate of questions that seek to examine long-held assumptions about objectives in geosciences: When we go “out there” with our students for field camps or extended field seminars, are we entitled to use the field as a natural laboratory? How do academic geoscience pedagogies and curiosity-driven, process-oriented, academic research questions fit into the broader discipline and practice of geology, which has grown out of and continues to provide the workforce for international corporate and colonial expeditions focused on the extraction of mineral resources, fossil fuels, and water? How does our teaching benefit other communities outside of the academy, and are we nurturing an ethic of community engagement and reciprocity? In this presentation, we consider the intersection of geoscience ethics and pedagogy. Our aim is to amplify and connect ongoing conversations in the field-oriented natural sciences about: disability and accommodations; race and cultural identity; and collaboration and parachute science. Geoscience teachers are sometimes discombobulated by these intersections because they illuminate fundamental challenges to the goals of geoscience education and make us uneasy about our own identities and practices. Let’s examine these discombobulations with compassion in pursuit of pedagogies that encourage radically collaborative learning, involve structured reflection about ethics and identity, including whiteness and ableism, and build reciprocity with communities out there.