Activating the Classroom: Geographical Fieldwork as Pedagogical Practice

Abstract

Much geographical scholarship on teaching and learning details the intellectual, technical and personal benefits stemming from residential field course offerings, reflecting characteristics of constructivist active learning. With the sustainability of these offerings in question given logistical and political issues, there is greater demand for changes in field course delivery and structure. This paper seeks to expand the range of pedagogical tools, contexts and ways in which geographical field experience can take place. It does so by reconceptualizing ‘the field’ based on the idea of ‘everyday life’ as a meaningful entry point within a classroom context, and as a space of learning in which students construct knowledge for themselves. An empirical investigation of student learning experiences explores the possibility of re-creating the benefits of residential field course offerings in a classroom-based field course.

Keywords:

• Geographical fieldwork
• experiential learning
• knowledge construction

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express appreciation to students at the University of Guelph who participated in the study during Fall 2005, as well as to the editor and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹ There is a potential non-response bias here given the fact that approximately half the students from the classroom-based course participated in the study compared with almost 100 per cent of those on the field-based course. While the former response rate is significantly higher than often occurs, the latter response rate can be deemed somewhat unusual.

² While the residential field course is made up of geography majors only, the classroom-based field course is open to students in geography and other disciplines. In this instance, 26 out of 59 students enrolled on the course were geography majors, and the same proportion of students participated in this study (13 geographers out of 32 students). For the purposes of this paper, we have chosen to focus on the quality of all student learning experiences (regardless of their declared major) in geography field courses.

³ Data on actual changes in attitude, behaviour and quality of work were not available for this study but would be an interesting component to consider in a future empirical analysis.