CORNELL UNIVERSITY FIELD PROGRAM IN EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS

Cornell University currently offers students a full semester-length field program in one of the Earth’s most spectacular natural laboratories, the Big Island of Hawaii. Participants in the Earth and Environmental Systems (EES) Field Program examine the interaction between the solid Earth, ocean, atmosphere and biosphere, spending seventeen weeks learning on the volcano, in the ocean, in the forest and under the sky. Specific topics include volcanology, geomorphology, plate tectonics, biogeochemistry, marine ecology, forest ecology, field geophysics, cultural studies and a service learning project.

But what happens when students remove themselves from their comfort zone? When they give up their traditional support systems; the library, the all-night computer lab? When they don’t cram for exams? When they choose to learn from a complex, uncontrolled natural system?

Our experience in Hawaii suggests that many things happen. The choice of Hawaii as a field site does give us some control over natural system parameters. We can control temperature by moving up or down the volcano, rainfall by moving around the mountain, time by moving to an older island in the chain. Nevertheless, students are forced to confront real systems. Our qualitative assessment of their work in the field reveals that the learning curve was at times a steep one, but ultimately successful. Students were initially very uncomfortable with the different style of learning that was required. Observation was stressed at the beginning of the program, with activities shifting to more technology- and data-driven experiments later in the semester. Students clearly prefer “numbers” to qualitative observation. Yet they often had difficulty in carrying out measurements. Technology gives the illusion of certainty and many students appear not to trust themselves, or do not have enough experience to recognize that their observations are actually quite useful. Students also had to learn to organize and present their data and observations in a meaningful way, and to discover that data acquisition is only the beginning of their analysis. Throughout the semester we watched our students become more independent learners and to become very self-reliant. Their observational and technological skills improve as they are literally immersed in the subject matter.