Field courses provide authentic, inspiring experiences for students because they spark students’ curiosity about the natural world, provide opportunities for them to closely observe nature, and can facilitate conversations with long-term residents, land managers, and indigenous people who know the landscape. However, some courses fail to deliver these positive outcomes because faculty neglect to cultivate a supportive learning environment in the field, ignore students’ concerns about risks, and inadvertently leave students less excited about the subject matter than before the course. Given that today's students have a limited number of opportunities to participate in field courses, we need each field experience to be as educational, inspiring, and transformative as possible. How do we teach better field courses?
This presentation will describe techniques that can be used to facilitate community development among students in the field. Anecdotes from field courses and practical tools described in the experiential, outdoor education literature will be shared to illustrate how to teach better field courses.
Visual Teaching (a.ka. Doodling in Class) Technology has given teachers the ability to prepare slide decks for lectures, show videos in class, and sometimes overwhelm students with too much information. Outdoor educators need to utilize a different skill set! This keynote inspires educators to go back to the drawing board using techniques, such as doodling, writing keywords, and mapping the flow of information to allow students to better retain and recall material. This presentation shows educators (and program administrators) how to effectively use field journaling, visual note-taking, nature sketching sketching, and mind mapping during field courses.
