Undergraduate Distance-Based International Fieldwork During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract:

The Responsible Mining, Resilient Communities project, funded through the National Science Foundation’s Partnerships for International Research and Education program, is an interdisciplinary, multi-institution, global research collaboration whose goal is to co-design socially responsible and sustainable mining practices with communities, engineers, and social scientists. A key component of this work is an exploration of how situated learning enhances undergraduate students’ effective learning of science and engineering concepts as well as their ability to formulate more feasible design solutions. Under typical conditions, this effort includes an extensive, in-person, field work component. Here, undergraduates work closely with Colombian artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) communities to develop appropriate sociotechnical solutions to problems identified by working with the miners. Unfortunately, the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic during late spring/early summer 2020 precluded all international fieldwork. This presentation will describe efforts undertaken to develop and execute a distance-based fieldwork experience, which required a very different approach than conventional distance-based learning. By partnering with partners in the ASGM communities via standard videoconferencing and messaging apps, undergraduates were able to collaboratively co-identify engineering problems and co-design potential sociotechnical solutions to those problems. Further, students participated in a distance-based highly-participatory capacity building workshop where they further refined their sociotechnical problem identification and solution skills. Preliminary results from a scholarship of teaching and learning study will be presented that help evaluate the efficacy of this novel program.