Field Activities in Geology teaching

Portuguese teachers’ opinions on ideal ways to using them

Abstract

Most geological phenomena are large scale phenomena in terms of both time and space. Therefore, they cannot be reproduced in the school laboratory to be studied. Thus, if the Geology teacher wants students to get in touch with those phenomena, he/she needs to organize a field trip so that the necessary learning activities can be undertaken in the place where the phenomena occur. However, even though teachers and students acknowledge the educational potential of field trips, teachers seldom organize them and they mention several impairments to justify it. This paper reports on the results of a research study carried out with 233 Biology and Geology Portuguese teachers that were asked about the ideal ways of integrating field activities in the 3rd cycle (n=102) and the secondary school (n=121) Geology teaching. The results suggest that the way teachers would like to put into practice field activities if there was no constraint to them, would not differ too much from real practices that are reported in the literature. In fact, teachers showed low exigency and audacity with regard to the way that they would like field activities to be put into practice. Therefore, pre-service and in-service teacher education should include training on how to appropriately use field activities and schools should be reorganized in order to facilitate teachers’ job of the preparing relevant field trips.