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 The Field Trip and Its Role in Teaching Ritual

David Pinault

in Teaching Ritual

This chapter describes the author's efforts to navigate naïve students through the rich diversity of religion in Silicon Valley, while enabling them to encounter the real people behind the exotic ... More

This chapter describes the author's efforts to navigate naïve students through the rich diversity of religion in Silicon Valley, while enabling them to encounter the real people behind the exotic facades. Along the way the chapter's author recites some of the poetry that resulted from 19th-century encounters of the strange and the human.Less

Making conservation come alive

Susan K. Jacobson, Mallory D. McDuff, and Martha C. Monroe

in Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques

Making conservation come alive can mean discovering the natural world around us through a neighborhood scavenger hunt or researching the perspectives of an industry group for a role-play. Many of the ... More

Making conservation come alive can mean discovering the natural world around us through a neighborhood scavenger hunt or researching the perspectives of an industry group for a role-play. Many of the techniques in this chapter emphasize the experiential approach to conservation education, such as hands-on activities, field trips, and wilderness skills. The aim of these techniques is to immerse the participants in exploring the outdoors or an environmental concept. Other techniques bring conservation alive through a minds-on approach, such as storytelling, games, case studies, role-playing, and contests. Planning these techniques involves both research and logistics. This chapter provides helpful hints for implementation, including tips for engaging an audience in a story or developing a role-play. Every technique engages the audience in learning through direct experience.Less

Making conservation come alive

Susan K. Jacobson, Mallory D. McDuff, and Martha C. Monroe

in Conservation Education and Outreach Techniques

Making conservation come alive can mean discovering the natural world through a neighborhood scavenger hunt or researching the perspectives of an industry group for a role-play. Techniques in this ... More

Making conservation come alive can mean discovering the natural world through a neighborhood scavenger hunt or researching the perspectives of an industry group for a role-play. Techniques in this chapter, such as hands-on activities, field trips, and backcountry skills, immerse participants in exploring the outdoors or an environmental concept. Other techniques bring conservation alive through a minds-on approach, such as storytelling, games, case studies, role-playing, and contests. Conservation educators can combine these techniques, such as the use of a role-play to teach backcountry skills. Most of the techniques in this chapter involve an element of fun, from a field trip exploring a wetland to a storytelling session on forests. This chapter contains helpful hints for implementation, including tips for engaging an audience in a story or developing a role-play. Every technique engages the audience in learning through direct experience.Less

Reshaping Reform: Discipline, Autonomy, and Group Relations

Peter Cave

in Schooling Selves: Autonomy, Interdependence, and Reform in Japanese Junior High Education

This chapter describes and analyzes changes in teachers’ approaches to students’ socialization and human development between 1996 and 2007, through a comparison of first year (seventh grade) field ... More

This chapter describes and analyzes changes in teachers’ approaches to students’ socialization and human development between 1996 and 2007, through a comparison of first year (seventh grade) field trips at Tachibana junior high school. In 1996, teachers focused on group discipline, based on the ideal of shūdan seikatsu (group life). By 2007, they had moved toward greater emphasis on promotion of autonomous thinking, influenced by the educational reform agenda and the new curricular domain of Integrated Studies (sōgō gakushū). However, the chapter also shows how reforms were adapted by the school to serve teachers’ priorities. The main foci of the 2007 field trip were developing human relationships and experiencing nature, rather than the creativity, problem-solving, and self-motivated learning that were main foci of the curricular reforms.Less

Learning History

Yoni Furas

in Educating Palestine: Teaching and Learning History under the Mandate

Chapter 8 completes the analytical framework by leaving administrators and educators to delve into the students’ world to trace their voices as the product of this system. The chapter examines the ... More

Chapter 8 completes the analytical framework by leaving administrators and educators to delve into the students’ world to trace their voices as the product of this system. The chapter examines the omnipresence of history beyond the history classroom, and it takes a broad view of the educational rationale that sought to mould a historical consciousness through an educational calendar, field trips, and youth movements. The latter part of the chapter discusses students’ essays in school journals and the internalization of, and correspondence with, the material they were taught, thus underscoring the centrality and validity of historical study in these young people’s identity formation.Less

Four Asian Tigers

Geok Chin Ivy Tan, John Chi-Kin Lee, Tzuchau Chang, and Chankook Kim

Alex Russ and Marianne E. Krasny (eds)

in Urban Environmental Education Review

This chapter describes innovative approaches, both within schools and across multiple sectors, to urban environmental education in the highly urbanized environments of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, ... More

This chapter describes innovative approaches, both within schools and across multiple sectors, to urban environmental education in the highly urbanized environments of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Seoul. Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea—the so-called “Four Asian Tigers”—pursued aggressive industrialization to boost economic growth, resulting in rapid urbanization. Today their cities are faced with acute urban problems. As each of these highly urbanized cities faces the complex challenges that come with development, they turned to urban environmental education to foster environmental awareness and environmentally responsible behaviors. The chapter examines the strategies adopted by Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Seoul, such as integrating environmental education into the school curriculum, inquiry-based field trips, technology, partnerships, and urban environmental centers.Less

Field Trip into the Twilight: A German Africanist Discovers the Black Bourgeoisie at Howard University, 1937–1939.

Berndt Ostendorf

in Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange

Julius Lips was among the fifty-one political refugees who fled Nazi-controlled Germany and Austria and sought asylum in America, where they eventually taught in nineteen historically black colleges ... More

Julius Lips was among the fifty-one political refugees who fled Nazi-controlled Germany and Austria and sought asylum in America, where they eventually taught in nineteen historically black colleges located mainly in the South. This chapter focuses on Lips’s academic career at Howard University from 1937 to 1939 and his discovery of black bourgeoisie on campus. It also examines Forschungsreise in die Dämmerung (Field Trip into the Twilight), a novel written by Lips after his return to the communist East Germany, where he worked as rector of Leipzig University in the early 1950s. In his novel, Lips blames white racist capitalism for the plight of African Americans but also argues that African Americans had something to do with much of their situation.Less

On Being Struck: Hitting the Eye/Arousing the Mind

Barbara Maria Stafford

in Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences

Before students can understand the many ways artists ask us to make sense of their creations, they need to understand how they themselves perceive and think. This essay explores the use of a ... More

Before students can understand the many ways artists ask us to make sense of their creations, they need to understand how they themselves perceive and think. This essay explores the use of a relational game in teaching our subjective involvement in seeing and resonating with the world. In a reversal of the classic Surrealist objet trouve experiment, participants must go out into the environment not to seek, but to await, an encounter with something that is other, that must be fitted together with our own changing perspectives. Such openness to the intrusion of our surroundings releases the viewer from self-absorption, revealing an independent, yet interdependent, space. This pedagogical game is a pragmatic example of situated cognition. Its phenomenological approach embeds thought in the lived environment. The extensive logic of the game undergirds another perception-enhancing practice. The life-long custom of taking field trips enhances the art of physical and mentally co-producing an always situated reality.Less

Nonformal Educational Settings

Joe E. Heimlich, Jennifer D. Adams, and Marc J. Stern

Alex Russ and Marianne E. Krasny (eds)

in Urban Environmental Education Review

This chapter examines the pedagogy of nonformal environmental education for urban audiences, focusing on different types of urban nonformal educational opportunities and situating them in the lives ... More

This chapter examines the pedagogy of nonformal environmental education for urban audiences, focusing on different types of urban nonformal educational opportunities and situating them in the lives of urbanites using the concept of “learningscapes.” Urban nonformal environmental education involves relating environmental content to the everyday lives of urban learners, ensuring learner autonomy, and integrating the institutions of environmental education providers within the broader array of social institutions in the urban environment. Nonformal urban environmental education programs according to participant choice and goals and provider goals include school field trips or related programs, casual visit to a community institution (for example, nature center), and recreational programs. The chapter suggests that urban environmental education providers have unique opportunities for connecting beyond traditional audiences due to the dense and diverse networks of programs within urban environments, from youth sports leagues to literacy clubs and neighborhood watches.Less

Civic Engagement in the Heart of the City

Rebekka King

in Teaching Civic Engagement

This chapter investigates teaching for civic engagement as a means of promoting student awareness of homeless and other marginalized communities. Drawing on the example of a third-year religion ... More

This chapter investigates teaching for civic engagement as a means of promoting student awareness of homeless and other marginalized communities. Drawing on the example of a third-year religion course taught at the University of Toronto on the topic of Religion and the City, it suggests that a dimension of pedagogies of civic engagement is making the familiar seem unfamiliar. Through a student field trip, literary works, and a mini-ethnography assignment, students explore places and sites to which they are intimately connected from the perspective of the outsider or an otherwise citizen non grata. This chapter offers a practical example of the ways in which teaching for civic engagement can be integrated into courses through consideration of theoretical materials, case studies, and cultural data.Less

Learning in Classrooms

Laura E. Berk

in Awakening Children's Minds: How Parents and Teachers Can Make a Difference

A visitor entering Tamara’s combined kindergarten/first-grade classroom is likely to be struck by its atmosphere of calm purposefulness, given that so much is ... More

A visitor entering Tamara’s combined kindergarten/first-grade classroom is likely to be struck by its atmosphere of calm purposefulness, given that so much is happening at once. On a typical day, twenty-two 5- to 7-year-olds are busy working on diverse activities throughout the room. At ten o’clock one Tuesday, several children were in the writing center—one preparing a thank you note and four others collaborating on making a list of the names of everyone in the class. In the reading center, five children were browsing the shelves or reading books, in pairs and individually. At a table next to shelves filled with math materials, four children worked in pairs on a problem requiring them to choose items from a restaurant menu without exceeding their budget. Yet another pair was immersed in an interactive computer activity about plants as sources of foods. Tamara was seated at a table, reading and discussing a story with a cluster of six children. The children in Tamara’s class come from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. About three-fourths live in the middle-income neighborhood surrounding the school, located in a midsize Midwestern city. The rest are bussed from a housing project for low-income families several miles away. Two children have reading disabilities, and one has a speech and language delay. Several times a week, a learning disabilities teacher and a speech therapist come to the classroom to assist these children. Tamara’s students present great variations in experiences, knowledge, and academic skills. She uses this diversity to enrich their learning. The classroom is organized into seven clearly defined activity centers. The largest is the reading center, which doubles as a class meeting area. Others are the writing center, the math center, the life science center, the physical science center, the art center, and the imaginative play/extended project center. Computers can be found in the life science and writing centers. All centers are brimming with materials—on shelves and in boxes and baskets, clearly labeled and within children’s easy reach. And each center contains a table to serve as a comfortable workspace for collaborative and individual pursuits. Less