Bridging Colorado and Mongolia through science, cultural exchange

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The Science-Engineering Inquiry Collaborative in Rural Colorado program, otherwise known as SCENIC, has been conducting programming in Colorado public schools for more than 10 years. On its program page, SCENIC is described as connecting "CU Boulder faculty and students with rural high schools to develop student-driven, inquiry-based science projects." This year, a multi-year partnership between SCENIC's program lead and co-founder, Associate Research Professor Daniel Knight, and two organizations in Mongolia allowed SCENIC to spread its wings.

In 2019, Public Lab Mongolia visited CU Boulder and the lab of Professor Michael Hannigan, Knight's partner in developing the Air Quality Inquiry Curriculum (AQ-IQ). Per their website, Public Lab Mongolia specializes in "community research in climate change, air pollution, urban services, and natural resources." Later that same year, Hannigan and Knight began weekly virtual meetings with Public Lab Mongolia with the goal of transferring AQ-IQ materials to Mongolian schools. This partnership led to the implementation of SCENIC-inspired programming in five high schools in Ulaanbaatar led by students at the National University of Mongolia.

Knight planned for the SCENIC group to travel to Mongolia in the summer of 2020 to further develop the partnership, but the trip was scrapped due to COVID. In late June 2024, Knight and two students - one undergraduate and one graduate - finally embarked on their long-awaited trip to Ulaanbaatar.

"It's a long time coming," Knight said. "We worked with them remotely for four years, but this was our first official SCENIC visit."

The first component of the trip was to run workshops for high schoolers and college undergraduates. CU Boulder students charged with leading these workshops took an innovative approach to developing the curriculum.

"We had one student from the air quality section, AQ, and then one student from the soil quality section, SQ," Knight said. "They actually developed a combined workshop, which we haven't really done before. Usually, we run AQ and SQ separately, but they wove together the two curricula to run a four-day workshop for full days at the National University of Mongolia and a half-day workshop out in a rural setting for the college students."

In Colorado, the SCENIC program is integrated into the curricula of select high school science classes. Knight explained that, in these scenarios, there will naturally be students who aren't as interested in the material. Because of the selectivity in choosing participants for the workshop in Mongolia, Knight found himself impressed and appreciative of the effort the Mongolian students showed.

"We had over a hundred applicants for the workshop. We whittled it down to 15, which is…our usual size for a section. They were excellent students," Knight said. "That was really neat and special to see how engaged they were in the curriculum, and how they totally fleshed out four full days working on their projects and probably would have gone longer if we had given them the time."

The other main component of the trip was a cultural exchange. Through a variety of activities, Knight and the CU Boulder students deepened their understanding of Mongolian culture.

The group traveled to rural Harhorin, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the ancient capital of the Mongolian Empire. They saw demonstrations of livestock herding, toured a 500-year-old Buddhist monastery and learned about the living practices of local Mongolians that have been a part of daily life for nearly 2,000 years.

"It was a great developmental experience for me and the students," Knight said.

During the cultural exchange, Knight learned how brutal Mongolian winters can be. While SCENIC programming in Colorado runs during the wintertime, Knight realized that running workshops in rural Mongolia in the summertime was essential.

"Out in the ancient capital, the [National University of Mongolia] has a field research site," Knight said. "That's where we did our half-day workshop. [It] made us all realize we could easily run a summer camp there, and maybe focus closer to the city for the winter programs."

For Knight, a major takeaway from the trip was seeing that, despite the differences and distance between Mongolia and Colorado, the workshops were just as impactful.

"Young people just get very excited about a personal project in a local and community-based setting," Knight said. "[They find it] way better than using textbook datasets that aren't really related to their personal experiences."

The SCENIC program is funded in part by the Office for Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship. Travel funds to Mongolia were supported through a Tier 1 grant.

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