VIRTUAL VS. VISCERAL FIELD EXPERIENCES: TWO PATHS DIVERGED... TAKE BOTH

In his book “Experience and Education” (1938), John Dewey declares that high-quality classroom learning can best be delivered when “…the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.” Such reconstruction, best approached when students are exposed to the actual experiences available at a learning site or place (e.g. a “field trip”), is often difficult or impossible in a public school setting. Educators are confronted with myriad obstacles in their attempts to provide place-based learning experiences, including cost, bureaucracy, scheduling logistics, and deviation from the prescribed curriculum sometimes burdened with restrictions such as common assessments or rigid curricular scope and sequence. Unable to remove themselves from these obstacles, many teachers have resorted to textbook content, worksheets, and more didactic instructional methods.

Several recent developments in both education and technology have emerged which may provide enhanced opportunities for teachers to develop place-based learning opportunities for their students while mitigating some of the pitfalls related to off-site field trips. First, local field experiences, conducted within a short walking distance from the school, provide students with data acquisition techniques and an understanding of how scientists ask questions, conduct investigations, and apply emergent understandings to local situations or problems. Electronic methods for data acquisition, manipulation, and communication (digital probes, Smartphones, iPod Touch devices, etc.) combined with web 2.0 tools can provide low-cost, high access techniques for educators desiring to embed “school yard” experiential learning into their curricula. Second, initiatives such as Virtual Fieldwork Experiences (VFEs) can be integrated into the school curriculum. These inquiry-based experiences rely on data and images assembled by educators across the nation using Earth Science Literacy Principles’ Big Ideas to mold the overarching questions: “How do we know what we know?” and “How does what we know inform our decision-making?”

The focus of this talk is to discuss these obstacles of incorporating place-based learning into the secondary classroom, and the strategies and benefits of overcoming them.