MUTUAL BENEFITS OF INTEGRATING NEW FIELD SITES INTO UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

Interactive, hands-on activities along with field-based work are an integral part of the geoscience curriculum. Students are more engaged and report a better understanding of the content from these methods of instruction. As university professors, we are responsible not only for optimizing the education of our students, but also with driving forward research in our field. We can merge our ongoing research, including new locales, with our course curriculum. We discuss how to integrate a new field site that is only partially characterized into a semester culminating project. The students practiced skills during early semester labs and worked with partners at the field site to describe rock units and collect samples. We found that advanced students added valuable impromptu measurements in the field that had been planned for future work. Moreover, all students collected samples for further study in the lab and a few observed features that we had missed in our initial characterization of the location. More eyes, even less experienced ones, can be valuable for recognizing features in the rocks at study sites. By incorporating a new field site into the course, the students experienced more realistic field work since the answer was only partially known, and they had to use the evidence they found to support their conclusions. In turn, the research project benefited from more observations of the rocks and additional samples collected.