In the summer of 2010, I and another faculty member took 12 Principia College students to Mongolia for eight weeks to study geology, natural history, and country studies. Five students had taken one or more geology courses, six had taken one or more natural history courses, and three who had had neither. A two quarter hour orientation course was taught in the spring term 2010 during which I covered plate tectonics, igneous rocks, sedimentary rocks, and groundwater. The rocks were covered primarily for field identification of the basic types and recognition of main outcrop features. The emphasis was on genesis – what is the story these rocks tell us? I lectured on global climate change on the abroad. Students were assigned topics to research and present orally to the group in the field at various points of the summer. Topics were assigned based on their background and varied from surface waters to geologic history of the Altai Mountains. Each student also researched a geologic topic that related to sustainability for Mongolia, for which they wrote a paper. These topics included various resources – mineral, energy, alternative energy, water, and soil – as well as waste water and solid waste management. The purpose of these projects was to give students a research focus as we traveled around the country; they were to interview Mongolians in different regions as appropriate for their topics.

We were stationed in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city. We took three trips to various parts of the country to see geologic features and ecosystems. These included the glacially carved Hangai Mountains that overlie a hot spot today, the Valley of the Lakes and Gobi Desert and their hidden treasures of mammals and dinosaurs, and the Altai Mountains whose lofty peaks are home to modern glaciers. We observed a cinder cone, a contact between rhyolite and granite, a massive landslide and fault scarps associated with a 1957 earthquake, paleolandslides, sand dunes, lake beds, river basins, glaciers and related features, and mountains.

Students kept journals and sketched features we observed. A few tests helped focus their learning. Peer teaching was encouraged. Instruction was less structured and often not linear as in the classroom. Student learning tended to be more effective. There were challenges as well as successes to this form of teaching geology.