 |
 |
|
What is ELS?
Support Expeditionary Learning
Our Publications |
Volume VlII, Issue No.3
Bringing Fieldwork Back to the Classroom By Colleen Broderick We sat in a circle, eyes puffy from crying. I gazed intently at each student, and each matched my gaze with equal confidence and intensity. I knew students had been transformed by the week's experience on the Navajo reservation in Window Rock, Arizona. Not only could they articulate Navajo philosophical foundations, creation myths, and contemporary Navajo governance structure (an amount of knowledge I would struggle to communicate during a month in the classroom), they also had confronted their own identities openly and honestly. What would happen once we returned to school? Would this deliberate consciousness remain? How could I help these kids keep what they found? -Personal Journal entry In many respects, the crew trip to the Navajo reservation during the spring of 1999 with 13 high school students and my colleague Randy Zimmerman changed my conception of fieldwork. Being on the reservation obviously made a big impact on the students, but I found it hard to sustain their learning once we returned to class at the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning, in Denver. The trip revealed the strengths and weaknesses of how we as a high school teaching team choose fieldwork, facilitate it, and foster its transference once we return. When I realized that we had never fully tapped the Navajo trip's potential, I knew I had to apply the lessons I learned from it to future fieldwork experiences. Untapped Potential Through personal research and a graduate class in Experiential Education with Richard Kraft, I learned numerous fieldwork techniques I was eager to implement. Many of the techniques I began to explore stemmed from the work of Michael Gass, coordinator of the Outdoor Education Program at the University of New Hampshire and chair of the Department of Kinesiology. Briefly, these techniques include: designing conditions for transfer before the experience actually begins; creating elements in class similar to those students will see in the field; providing means for students to internalize their own learning; placing more responsibility for learning with the students; and developing processing techniques that foster the transfer of learning back in the classroom. Through my research, I began to realize that I could plan fieldwork in the same manner that I plan a class. For example, just as I establish learning goals and expectations in the classroom, I could do the same in the field. For some reason, this felt like a huge epiphany. I am fairly new at integrating fieldwork, and this parallel to planning instruction for the classroom provided me with concrete steps I could take when implementing field experiences. I began to articulate more clearly the objectives of a trip beforehand and thought about how I would provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning during and after the trip. New Strategies The preparation for the five-day trip was extensive, both behind the scenes and in the classroom. Karin Krauth-Strayton, our trip coordinator, began arranging opportunities in the two cities that would bring students into contact with people, not agencies. In the classroom, students explored the issues they would encounter on the border through readings, small group discussions, and Socratic seminars. The readings ranged from articles from the El Paso newspaper and the New York Times, to descriptions of the physical conditions on the border, to an academic analysis of the economic conditions. Students also participated in activities exploring stereotypes and culture. By the time we headed to El Paso, students had already began to formulate theories concerning the issues of the border. Once on site, students toured the colonias in El Paso, helped with a service project at a church in Juarez, worked with elementary school children in the Juarez schools, shared a meal with migrant farm workers, met with lawyers, and prepared a meal for Dr. Mendoza, a missionary doctor in Mexico. Students also attended presentations at the border control, La Mujer Obreras (an organization that supports the rights of women workers in the textile factories), and the detention center for undocumented juveniles. Upon reflection, I had realized that during the Navajo trip we could have used debriefs more purposefully. So in El Paso, we had very specific debriefs and evening activities that helped students make sense of their experiences and to connect their experiences from day to day. For example, after a day touring the maquiladoras, or factories with substandard conditions, students voiced confusion about economic conditions in Mexico. They wanted to blame the maquiladoras for perpetuating the poverty in the city. In anticipation of this confusion, that evening's activity included a role-play that traced the historical events and economic forces that had created the present conditions. Another strength of the El Paso/Juarez trip was that we used similar rituals that students were familiar with in school. Every morning began with a circle that was similar to the community meetings that we had every morning at RMSEL. Like the community meeting, I shared a reading or a quotation for the day that was intended to guide our thinking. These rituals provided a structure so that students seemed centered when they moved on to their day. Bringing the Fieldwork Home Unlike other fieldwork experiences that I have participated in, the border trip's impact has endured. The follow-through activities and the art show helped us sustain the border trip by providing something concrete that we can still refer to in our present expedition on the San Luis Valley, a predominately Mexican-American region in Colorado. The San Luis expedition explores culture and story, and we have been able to build on the students' understanding by referring to the border fieldwork for examples and analogies. Recently, we welcomed back a senior who continued her exploration of the border on her independent senior expedition. Without a doubt, the transfer of field learning is difficult, and it is something our high school teaching team is still experimenting with. The preparation and strategies we used on the Juarez trip seemed to help the students deepen their understanding of the expedition's ideas and questions. Nonetheless, I find myself still reflecting on the Navajo trip. I am confident that students were transformed while on the trip, but I only wish I could have helped students sustain the results longer. During one of our evening discussions in a hogan on the reservation, I asked our guide Phil Bluehouse how people keep a vision alive, and he told me you need to repeatedly articulate the experience. In a sense, that is what we have done since we returned from Juarez, and it has indeed kept our learning alive. Colleen Broderick is a teacher at the Rocky Mountain School for Expeditionary Learning in Denver, Colorado.
By Meg Campbell
While visiting different expeditionary learning schools recently, I asked about the extent of fieldwork undertaken by students. In some schools, I was told fieldwork is a privilege that must be earned by students; only certain students "get" to participate. In my understanding, it seemed like the "good students" conducted fieldwork and the "troublemakers" stayed back in class. I wondered if the students felt quarantined, punished, or indifferent. It was hard to imagine those left behind feeling very engaged. Might there be a different way to think about fieldwork? What if we were to place fieldwork on a par with books? I revere books and their potential for opening new worlds of understanding. I know there is a long history of struggle for the universal right to learn to read and write, but it is a struggle that I hope has been won in our schools. Learning to read and write is a right; it need not be earned. Every student has access to books. If reading a text together is a central part of a learning expedition, then fieldwork, which is reading a different kind of "text" together, must also be central. I believe it is often the students who are "kept behind" who may need the intellectual nourishment of field experiences more than any other students in the class. For what does going out and exploring do? It fosters curiosity, imagination, wonder, and observation skills. It provides a feast to reflect upon. Learning is chewing ideas and taking some in, and frankly, spitting some out. It is mind work, but it must be fed by experience and by guided reflection on that experience. "But you don't know the population of students we have!" I can hear someone counter. Lisa Delpit, in Other's People Children (New York: The New Press, 1995) , challenges us to view every student as if he or she were our own child. Looking at how we organize fieldwork is a compelling indicator of whether or not we view students as our own children. Are we hungry for our students to have a wide range of field experiences, or is fieldwork tacked on as a reward? We can all cite horror stories from the field, but we can also cite instances when those same students have "risen to the occasion" when invited to a nice restaurant or to teacher's home, for example. Students generally reflect what's expected as appropriate behavior; if they have learned either bad habits or no habits about pursuing their education beyond classroom walls, then it is not surprising that the revert to inappropriate behavior. We have to work hard at building the necessary skills and putting learning first. Just as in an Outward Bound wilderness course, our success is defined by our group's ability to ensure that we all reach the summit; we do not leave someone behind. Crew members are more likely to take responsibility for each other if success of the expedition depends on everyone's participation. We know that it is extra work for all of us, but we believe it is so important that we will ask every student to participate and, if necessary, we will defer until we are all ready to go. If viewed as a core purpose of education, fieldwork is valued and organized differently in a school. Fieldwork becomes a given and a priority. We invest precious time at the beginning of the expedition to clarify and work together on the habits that will be necessary for us to conduct any fieldwork in our crews. We use fieldwork as a powerful motivator to tackle project work in the learning expedition. According to Mike McCarthy, principal of King Middle School in Portland, Maine, "We view fieldwork as an essential part of the learning expedition. Small heterogeneous groups might go out for parts of the investigation, but for the whole class part, we add supervision rather than subtract students. We call parents-and they hear the desperation in our voices-and tell them the truth: We need you. We can't take the students to the field site without you. Will you help us? Parents respond, even parents who may traditionally not have been active as school volunteers." Traditional schooling is a very sedentary experience. Experience helps crack open schooling to wider and deeper learning, but field experience alone does not guarantee learning. If it is not followed up with time for guided reflection, much of the opportunity for deeper learning is lost. There can be schools where students flit from field experience to field experience without any purposeful reflection or creation of original work based on their field experience. This is not mind-nourishing either. We call it fieldwork because it is work. It should be hard and demanding. Going out, we should learn things that we could not learn so fully if we had stayed in our seats. We always go out with a question we want to answer. Generating these questions ahead of time is an important part of scaffolding for effective fieldwork. Yes, we have guiding questions, but we also have individual student questions. What am I looking for? What am I interested in learning about? As students explore cyberspace more and more, the physical need to go outside and explore the real world will grow more precious, not decrease. It is quite an astonishing marvel to see a late nineteenth-century, Northern Cheyenne quill mask for a horse (www.si.edu/nmai/) on a screen, but it is not the same thing as standing before the object at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City in real life. Yes, let us explore cyperspace's riches, but let us not shortchange what is there for the discovering when we go outside with our questions with students. Meg Campbell is the director of program development for Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound.
A Glass Window onto the Community By Carla Rowdy
Four years ago, I was a relatively new high school teacher with classroom management as my weakest area. I needed to make learning fun, safe, and challenging. With tremendous support from Cross Creek School's administration, I used my passion for making stained glass as a link between my students, environmental studies, and the outside community. Asking students to make beautiful glass pieces for the community became a hook for them to learn an art form and a skilled trade-as well as all the science and language arts they needed to support it. Four years later, we now operate the only stained glass and mosaic production company in our Pompano Beach, Florida school system. Students produce Tiffany-style glass pieces on commission and for general sale. They cut glass, use high temperature soldering irons, work with acids, and create incredible pieces of artwork through the physical conundrum of glass. We visit several glass shops to compare prices, purchase supplies, and meet with glass artists. I provide the seed money, but then the classes become self-sufficient. Students work off a profit and loss balance sheet, with profits going toward the purchase of their own personal glass tools. Students who learn to produce high quality work on an independent basis take their equipment home and start their own businesses. Currently, we have five students who are independent partners. Glass projects have become a central part of the learning expeditions I do. This year, we have been working on an expedition on Florida's endangered species. Our goal is to produce a guide to the endangered ferns at a local nature preserve, Fern Forest. Students need to be able to identify a fern and its species, complete a technical rendering of the fern frond, include research material on the habitat, size, and characteristics, and publish the guide. As an additional project in the expedition, students have created mosaic stepping stones and flowerpots with the fern motif. Where stained glass requires precision cutting, grinding, and using a soldering iron and acids, mosaic work only requires pieces of glass adhered to a base and grouted. Students who have trouble writing about a fern build confidence by creating a tile, stone, or pot. They have to read about the particular fern and convert an actual frond or photo into a pattern. Using math skills, they estimate the amount of area that will be covered in glass, how much glass is needed, what quantity of glue to use, and the ratio of grout to water. They also have to figure out the costs of every phase of construction. They end up using language arts, science and art skills throughout the project. Most of the students at our school struggle with emotional or behavioral disabilities. Time and again, I watch as the glass projects hook students who were turned off by typical assignments. I knew, for instance, that Matt found reading and writing challenging, but I did not know he had a hidden talent. For his research project, he chose the squid, and on a whim, I asked if he could draw a squid. From a student who had earned the worst behavioral reputation at school, this young man sat still for 90 minutes each day for two weeks to get his drawing perfect. During his research phase, he asked our class volunteer, Ms. Riedle, to sit with him and spell words while he typed them into a PowerPoint presentation that was excellent. He entered his drawing into a local Marine Science Fair and won a 3rd place ribbon out of l3OO juried exhibits. Matt's self esteem got a serious boost as his peers started asking for his help in making patterns for the glass designs of other species. He has parlayed his talents into the glass production company and has created some incredible stepping stones from his drawing. Now, are all his problems solved? No, Matt still works on his behavior, but he found one way to make his science education engaging. A good student, Guido works hard at trying to keep up with the work and ignore the inappropriate behavior of his peers. The mosaic stepping stones were a natural way for him to complete his assignment and learn a trade. He solicited Matt to help make bird patterns for an environmental fair we were attending where six students were selling their mosaic bird stepping stones. Guido was able to sell enough stones to earn his own personal stained glass equipment. Guido also joined us at two private houses where the glass company was installing a stepping stone walkway. Students had to measure and photograph the yard, diagram the arrangements of plant life, and interview the patron for personal preferences. Students were charged with returning to the classroom and finalizing designs for the walkways. For the final step, students presented the patron with a portfolio of options to choose from for installation. The very academic skills that were problematic for Guido were the ones he used in completing this assignment. Plus, he had to assume a leadership role to mentor novice glass students. He read a variety of research articles and books on ferns, wrote in a daily observation journal, used his math estimation skills, and honed his artistic talents, all while wandering around a patron's fern-covered yard. So how does glass fit into the science curriculum? Well, if you were to ask my students, you would get a variety of answers. By knowing which chemicals need to be combined to produce specific colors, they can estimate the cost of a sheet of glass. They know that red and purple glass needs gold, among other chemicals, to obtain their colors. Because they realize that tremendous heat is needed to create a fragile sheet of glass, they understand how a simple carbide wheel will separate the molecules in order to sever the atomic bonds and cut the sheet. Or they might explain the chemical bond necessary to have acid and lead adhere to copper, which encases the glass. They would say all that and much more before they even started talking about all the aesthetic and visual dramatics of creating stained glass. Glass science seems to be a creative answer to reach most of our students' needs in an alternative way. Please don't burst their bubble by telling them that their glass production is truly harder than most science projects. All they care about is that it is fun. Carla Rowly is a teacher at Cross Creek School in Pompano Beach, Florida.
Guest Speakers as Literacy Development
By Suzanne Plaut, Christina Patterson, and Joe Zaremba
Last fall, 60 seventh-grade students and five teachers from the Harbor School in Boston set out on a learning expedition called "Colonial Dreams." We wanted our students to understand the lives of everyday people, so we asked them to write a biography of a historically accurate fictional character, draw an architectural rendering of their character's home, and do a dramatic interpretation or portrait of their character. As a Humanities team, we structured reading and writing activities that would help students understand their colonial character, but because our students' literacy skills range widely, we turned to guest lecturers to strengthen students' background knowledge. The speakers brought to life the descriptive detail, storytelling, and character development techniques we wanted our students to use in their own work. Since some of our students were going to develop Native American characters, we invited Ms. Caring Hands, a member of the Natick Praying Indian tribe whose ancestors had been sent to Deer Island (in the Boston Harbor) to speak. She focused on the culture and etiquette of her tribe, as well as how her people record and transmit history. Katrina, who later created a Native American woman named "Creative Star," says Ms. Caring Hands helped her understand the reading in her packet of research materials. Katrina later wrote: She described what her clothes were made of, and gave us Indian popcorn, which was nasty! She told us how they were in the old times and that when they killed an animal they stopped to pray. She explained how the designs on their belts tell a story and that the different colors meant different things, so when I made my own wampum belt, I could make up colors that made sense: green tells about the land, black about the spirit. In addition to the belt, Ms. Caring Hands showed baskets and other artifacts that students were reading about in their packets and would need to incorporate into their scenes or portraits. She sang songs in her native language and let students drum with her, creating not only visual but auditory images our students could later access. For most of our students, Ms. Caring Hands was the first Native American they had ever met. She kindled the respect for diversity we strive to foster. Yet she also promoted literacy by connecting her life to the lives of our students-showing how all cultures have stories, songs, dances, and ritual-and by giving them a depth of understanding of another culture to draw on when they began their research and writing. An actress from Plymouth Plantation (a museum with historic reenactments) also came in character as Pilgrim Eleanor Billington, the wife of John Billington who was a big trouble-maker in the Plymouth Colonies. Seeing her in full costume of a colonial American, understanding the way language was spoken back then, again helped students' reading come off the page. She stayed in character while students asked questions that came to mind. Since this presenter actually came two weeks before we went to the plantation, she served as a sort of pre-reading for the fieldwork itself. Students knew what to look for, and they had done an oral "rough draft" of the kinds of questions they would later prepare for our actual site visits. Seeing "Mrs. Billington" also gave students a benchmark about how to embed historical facts in a presentation-about what their character eats, how he or she dresses, what he or she believes in-into both their written biography and their dramatic interpretation. In addition, she made reading and writing from a particular perspective real. She stepped into a life while sticking to history. When the actress finally broke character, our students were stunned. One asked, "Why can you tell me how to spell that word now, but five minutes ago when I asked you, you said you didn't know?" She responded simply, "Before, I was in character. In the 1600's, Mrs. Billington would not have known how to read or write." In addition, her comments (along with those of Ms. Caring Hands) injected other issues related to literacy that we planned to return to later: how did different cultures and classes make sense of the world in the colonial era? Did they use song or speech or writing to tell their story? She explicitly addressed our guiding question: "What do I need to know and do to be a good researcher?" She discussed how she used primary sources and other documents to develop her scene, and how she determined what information was essential. Our students already knew they would be reading to find information about their character's "Five C's": color, class, context, culture, and character. Here, they saw that this actress had not only gone through the same steps, but also had synthesized that information in a flesh-and-blood dramatic interpretation. Thus, they saw in the research we were asking them to do the reading and writing tasks actual historians and performers do as adults. Suzanne Plaut, Christina Patterson, and Joe Zaremba are teachers at the Harbor School in Dorchester, Massachusetts.
Teachers Find Service Just Outside School Doors
By Laura Flaxman
Early on an August morning, a group of teachers walked tentatively into the Claddagh Inn, a food pantry and soup kitchen in the Rockaway Beach section of Queens, New York. It was the first day of the summer institute for the Active Learning Prep School (ALSP), an expeditionary learning school-within-a-school located in Rockaway Beach. The school had identified the need to use more community resources in the curriculum, but in order to know how to link expeditions to the community, the teachers needed to know what opportunities lay outside their school doors. They decided the best way to find out was to make the time as a whole staff to plunge right in. The group stepped inside a small building covered from floor to ceiling with boxes of donated food and other goods. Teachers were greeted by Mrs. Jones, the woman responsible for making sure that the hundreds of people who came every day got hot meals and bags of groceries. After a tour of the place, including the kitchen where vast quantities of food were being prepared, and the vegetable garden outside, the teachers signed up for tasks. Some helped in the kitchen, some rearranged the boxes, and some distributed meals and food. The next couple of hours flew by as a seemingly endless stream of people passed through the doors and out again, laden with aromatic containers and grocery bags. At the end of the day, when the faculty got together to reflect on their experiences, people were visibly moved. Several spoke of never having done anything like that before in their lives and how affected they were personally. By the end of the week, the faculty worked at transferring the experience from the personal realm to the professional, so that the power of what they had experienced could be shared with students. One result was that the school has developed a relationship with the Claddagh Inn and students offer their service there throughout the year. If expeditionary learning is about the power of experience, it makes sense that adult learning would parallel student learning, and that both would benefit from learning by doing. Pat Tubridy, the principal at ALPS, said having the faculty experience the power of service for themselves was the most influential factor in making service a priority in the school. The time the teachers spent at the Claddagh Inn introduced them not only to the possibilities of service, but also to the fact that learning opportunities await them in places they pass by every day. Laura Flaxman is an Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound school designer.
|
