Geology

Mission Statement

The Geology Department is a place of active inquiry and intellectual exploration for faculty and students who are engaged in academic courses and original research in Earth Sciences. We use Colorado College's flexible Block Plan schedule to teach distinctive courses that extensively utilize the natural laboratory of the Rocky Mountain West and learning in the field to engage students in observing natural systems, understanding geologic time and geospatial concepts, studying the processes that make Earth a complex and dynamic system, and solving geological problems.

Curricular Goals

The Geology Department serves geology majors and CC students who opt to include geoscience perspectives in their liberal arts education through the implementation of the following goals:

Goal One: Establish a strong foundational knowledge of fundamental principles of geology, in order to impart an understanding of geologic time scales and spatial concepts and bring insight into the Earth as a complex and dynamic system.

Goal Two: Offer scientific experiences that train students in observing natural systems and apply such observations towards building an understanding of the Earth.

Goal Three: Bring geoscience perspectives to bear on students' lives.

Goal Four: Prepare geology majors to function as earth scientists.

Goal Five: Contribute to the aims of a liberal arts education.

How do we achieve this?   

The Geology Department at Colorado College offers introductory and advanced courses in earth sciences that may lead to a B.A. in geology. Half of our faculty teach in the Environmental major, as well as in Geology, and all of the professors enthusiastically offer cross-disciplinary and General Education courses on a variety of topics. In addition, we enjoy the chance to collaborate with CC students on independent study/research projects that involve primary investigation in Earth Sciences.

Land Acknowledgement

The Geology Department acknowledges that our educational programs are carried out in the homelands of the Ute and other Native peoples and rely on networks of travel paths developed by these peoples.  We also acknowledge that Colorado College and our department were founded upon practices of resource extraction and land appropriation that dishonored and diminished the traditional lifeways in this region.  These practices displaced indigenous populations, and degraded landscapes, and led to unequal distribution of wealth, health, and opportunity in the Rocky Mountain West.  Yet the Ute and Native populations are living people with a present and a future as well as a past, and we strive to learn from their knowledge of earth systems to create a more inclusive field of study while seeking to redress the exclusions and erasures they have endured.

2021 Anti-racism Commitment

We commit to learning, listening, and working to become an antiracist department and program, in order to offer a welcoming place of study and home department for students of all backgrounds and identities. We acknowledge that a culture of racism often works unconsciously in our thoughts, actions, and words (Hill, 2008), and that without an active awareness of racism we as educators and learners may inflict harm.  We recognize that the compositional diversity of the U.S. population as a whole is not represented among students and professionals in STEM fields, a disparity that is even more pronounced in the geological sciences. Addressing this limitation will strengthen earth science.

Within the CC Geology Department, we are working to: 1) be engaged and actively aware of racism both in academia and everyday life, 2) counter racist expressions and behavior, and 3) take collective action to change, transform, or augment department policies, practices, and policies to be inclusive and equitable. We are participating in URGE, a federally funded semester-long antiracism education workshop in geoscience, that guides our creation of Departmental policies and actions that will form our own antiracist framework, which in turn helps to achieve the College’s mission to become antiracist. 

Cited work: Hill, Jane H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

The Geology major curriculum is designed to provide a foundation for a professional career in the Earth sciences, provide the background for graduate school, which is a prerequisite for many professions, and provide an opportunity for CC students from other majors to combine their focus discipline with geology and educate students about the physical environment and humanity's place in it, as part of a liberal arts education.