Students as Tour Guides: Innovation in Fieldwork Assessment

Abstract

This paper introduces and details an innovative mode of fieldcourse assessment in which students take on the role of tour guides to offer their lecturer and peers a themed, theoretically informed journey through the urban landscape of Havana, Cuba. Informed by notions of student-centred learning and mobile methods, the tour offers an enjoyable, challenging, rigorous yet flexible form of assessment that can be effectively transferred to a wide range of contexts. Feedback suggests that students are very positive about the tours in relation to other potential modes of assessment both in terms of what they learn and as an experience. Ongoing efforts to develop the tours since they were first used in 2003 are described.

Keywords:

• Fieldwork
• assessment
• student tours
• student-centred learning
• mobile methods
• Cuba

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank David Higgitt, Tim Hall and three anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks are also extended to Gavin Bridge for his many contributions to the Cuba fieldcourse since 2006 and to James Evans for advice on mobile methodologies.

Notes

¹ The choice of Cuba as a field location reflected the individual preferences of the authors at the time but encompassed a desire to immerse students in a locale that offers a completely different sociopolitical environment from that with which they are usually familiar (we find that only a tiny handful of students have visited Cuba ahead of the fieldcourse).

² We do not seek to focus here on the extent to which fieldwork has come under increased pressure and scrutiny in many institutional and national contexts as a relatively time-/resource-intensive and ‘risky’ learning activity. For more on these issues see: Rundstrom & Kenzer, 1989; Clark, 1996; McEwen, 1996; Pawson & Teather, 2002; McGuinness & Simm, 2005; British Standards Institution, 2007.

³ Clearly this is more student-driven than students simply following a guided walk, or field trail, a practice used in many departments as part of field teaching.