BACK IN THE VAN: ENGAGING STUDENTS, REINFORCING CONCEPTS, AND BUILDING COMMUNITY DURING THE DOWNTIME ON LONG-DISTANCE FIELD TRIPS

Does field trip activity end when students get back in the vans? Studies on the effectiveness of Earth science field trips focus on the value of field-based learning, field trip style and pedagogy, accessibility and inclusion, prosocial interactions, and sense of place. Downtime while traveling is not usually prioritized, but as described here, may enhance field trip effectiveness via active learning, co-creation of knowledge, timely feedback, and sense of place (e.g., Jones & Washko, 2022). Downtime between stops can be important for processing complex concepts, resting, and socializing. Students may not have the opportunity to interact with faculty, and cannot be reasonably expected to take notes or review trip guides if they experience carsickness. During the extended travel time on long-distance field trips, students often grow bored and disengage, miss significant changes in topography, landforms, and ecosystems, and fail to make connections between course concepts and the geology currently in front of them.

I run long-distance field trips to the Hot Springs-Little Rock region of Arkansas (4 days, 12 stops, ≥ 710 miles) for Mineralogy, and to the Blue Ridge in Tennessee and North Carolina (5 days, 11 stops, ≥ 2,150 miles) for Igneous and Metamorphic Petrology. To counter the issues described above, I developed a points-based team competition for the Spring 2024 trip. To keep teams evenly matched, I assign students to vans/teams. I text a question to the teams ~30-60 minutes before they will observe the feature in question. Teams text back when they have answers and points are awarded as appropriate. This activity evolved to reward great observations, questions answered at outcrops, completing meal-related tasks, and random acts of kindness towards classmates. The competition is low-stakes (e.g., a bonus point on an upcoming mineral exam), but students are enthusiastically engaged and ask for more questions. Questions are easy to prepare or add on the fly, and scores can be tallied in a field notebook, but it can be challenging to keep the competition going when the trip gets busy. Benefits of this activity include improved student engagement, reinforcement of concepts and connections with field observations, and team- and community-building. Student response has been unexpectedly and overwhelmingly positive.