The field as touchstone

For several years during and after college, I worked as a guide on the San Juan River in southeastern Utah. The San Juan is not a river one seeks out for its rapids and the thrill of running whitewater. Instead, what attract many visitors to float its muddy waters even in midsummer, when the flow drops to a trickle, are the surroundings: sandstone cliffs that host cliff dwellings and rock art panels, canyons with meanders incised more than a thousand feet into Permian and Pennsylvanian limestones.

One of the oldest units exposed in the canyon is of particular interest to a subset of river runners. An intermittent layer of algal mounds with “moldic and vuggy porosity” (a phrase that always stuck in my head for sounding vaguely disgusting but means, basically, holes that form from dissolving shells and rock) exposed near Eight-Foot Rapids is the same unit from which major oil companies have extracted hundreds of millions of barrels of oil. Along the river, you can put your hands on it, trace the shape of the mounds, and sniff the oil seeps in a few places (Figure 1), but 20 miles east, in the Aneth oil field on the Navajo Nation, it lies 6000 feet beneath the surface. Each summer, the company I worked for took several boatloads of reservoir engineers and the occasional petroleum geologist down the river to see the rocks they had only encountered in a model, sitting in front of a computer in Houston.

Figure 1. Photograph of the algal mounds in the Upper Canyon of the San Juan River, with rafts. The slight undulations in the limestone layers are caused by draping over the mounds, not folding.

None of the engineers were geologists by training; most were uneasy in the outdoors in general, and many found the intensity of the sun and the landscape overwhelming. When we parked the boats at the beach at Eight-Foot and led them on the short hike up to the outcrop that was mercifully in the shade, they were giddy with the heat and the novelty of the situation. Over the course of a short lecture from the attending geologist, they would slowly come to their senses, eventually realizing that we were sitting in the reservoir. They would reach out timidly to touch the rock and say things like, “That’s a vug?” and “This is what limestone actually looks like?”

As a college student majoring in geology, I laughed and felt smug in my superior knowledge and understanding of the real Earth, the real reservoir, whereas they knew only simulacra. I liked to think they went back to their computers enlightened and humbled, recognizing the field as the touchstone for their work. In reality, I suspect they returned sunburnt and dehydrated, and perhaps prone to forget about the shockingly irregular porosity of the real rock. And in reality, of course, I had more than a few comeuppances—in the field and otherwise—about my supposedly superior knowledge.

The word “touchstone” came to my mind as a metaphor for “the field” as I considered the four articles in this issue that address field experiences. All emphasize the foundational nature and critical importance of learning in the field, which drew me to the word, but I thought I might be missing something in thinking of a touchstone as, more or less, “the foundation one should always be in touch with.” So I looked it up, using my favorite source for deep definitions, the online Oxford English Dictionary. What pleasure to be had! I was indeed missing something. Perhaps not surprisingly, the earliest use of the word touchstone was an actual stone, a black marble used as a building stone. Nearly as early, however, was a second use—also a real stone but something more like a streak plate: a fine-grained dark rock on which purported samples of gold or silver would be rubbed, and the resulting mark compared to samples of known purity. It is the latter use that led to the figurative definition of touchstone that is used most frequently today: a criterion against which the value or genuineness of something is judged.

The field—the reality of Earth in all its complexity—is a geoscientist’s touchstone, the criterion against which every geologic map, every climate model, every visualization of change over time, every reconstruction of the past is judged. For many geoscience educators, students’ ability to experience the field is the criterion against which many courses and programs are judged. In their landmark synthesis article, Mogk and Goodwin (2012) highlighted the many benefits of learning in the field, which go far beyond learning the content to include motivation and bringing students into a community of practice.

The complexity of Earth, however, matches the complexity of modern society and individuals. The field might be hard to get to, requiring more time or greater expense than is available in a given course or program; it might be dangerous, underwater, or on Mars. Going into the field might be unfathomable or unappealing to some students, whereas it is compelling and intriguing to others. Field skills might be difficult to teach or to learn. If we want to maintain the field as touchstone, how do we as geoscience educators help all students see the value and benefit from these experiences without restricting access, intentionally or unintentionally?

Mogk and Goodwin (2012) also laid out an agenda for further research, and their call has not gone unanswered. Two Curriculum & Instruction articles in this issue describe virtual field experiences and their use in introductory geoscience courses. Growing enrollment, combined with limited budgets and new technologies, has motivated Dolphin, Dutchak, Karchewski, and Cooper (this issue) and Mead and colleagues (this issue) to develop virtual field experiences. Both work to mimic real field experiences to the extent possible, including some uncertainty and undirected time at the outcrop (Dolphin et al., this issue) and adaptive feedback (Mead et al., this issue). Both acknowledge the advantages and challenges with this approach, and both agree that the other option—no field experience, real or virtual, at the introductory level—is a poor alternative.

In more advanced courses, the field takes on added importance as students build their skills in extracting data from the real world through observations. In another Curriculum & Instruction article, Schiappa and Smith (this issue) affirm the value of real field experiences for upper-level students, emphasizing that field-based courses build community in a way that is difficult to replicate in the classroom. They describe a new, multidisciplinary course that brings students from different disciplines together to help them integrate the complexity of Earth with the complexity of society.

In a Research article, Hannula (this issue) describes a specific spatial thinking skill students develop in a field experience geared for those who are pursuing geoscience degrees. Her work provides a baseline for comparison against which alternatives (such as virtual field experiences) could be measured. Validating this criterion, the field, requires studies such as these, which define the skills that can be learned only (perhaps) in the field, constraining when and how we should invest in those experiences for different groups of students.

I would love to know how, if at all, that one day on the San Juan River influenced the models built by reservoir engineers who worked for Texaco or Shell. Was that Pennsylvanian limestone their touchstone, or do they only remember the inevitable water fight that came after their exploration of the outcrop? I like to imagine that some of them have pictures like mine in Figure 1 tacked to their computers, a reminder of the rock and the people together.