Geography Field Trip Research Articles

Designing Virtual Pathways for Exploring Glacial Landscapes of Glacier National Park, Montana, USA for Physical Geography Education

Virtual field trips in physical geography transcend our human limitations regarding distance and accessibility, allowing students to experience exemplars of physical environments. These experiences can be critical for students to connect to the physical world beyond traditional classroom formats of communicating themes and features in physical geography. To maximize the learning potential of these experiences, designers must engage in a translational process to take resources and content from the physical world and migrate it to an online, virtual format. However, these virtual learning experiences need to account for how learners learn; and should draw heavily on the foundations of educational research and field sciences, while highlighting the awe and beauty of the natural landscape itself. Crafting these spatial stories of the natural world with learning elements requires careful and intentional design to maximize the perception of physical features, patterns, and processes at the landscape scale. To help field-trip developers comprehend the workflows used to create perceptible, rich environments that spur students’ learning, we propose a development process (TECCUPD) as a guide to navigate the intersection of education and science, using an example of geodiversity and alpine glacial landscapes found in Glacier National Park, Montana.

The paradox of the ‘sustainable fieldtrip’? Exploring the links between geography fieldtrips and environmental sustainability

ABSTRACT The global climate emergency raises important questions for the future of fieldtrips in geographical education. Building on a longer history of these debates in the discipline, geography educators are paying increased attention to the environmental impacts of field-based education, as demonstrated by the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers’ (RGS-IBG) recent Principles for Undergraduate Field Courses. However, as important as these steps are, there is relatively little study of student engagement with discussions on the environmental sustainability of geographical fieldtrips. Reporting on a research project involving a survey, learning intervention and semi-structured interviews with undergraduate geographers based at an East Midlands university in the UK, specifically exploring these students’ perspectives on geography fieldtrips and environmental sustainability, we argue that participatory and collaborative dialogue between teachers, students and other geographical stakeholders is crucial as geographers continue to grapple with the ethical, political, and environmental implications of these debates.

A Proposal for Geography Competence Assessment in Geography Fieldtrips for Sustainable Education

The geography fieldtrip is a well-consolidated learning mode, but may become a procedural teaching strategy in geography. In geographical education, fieldtrips foster students’ overall knowledge-building processes to become world citizens, and thus to be fully committed to the Earth’s sustainability. Fieldtrips prepare students for applying and connecting knowledge in a real context. However, the geography fieldtrip may lack robust proposals on challenges and achievements that are clearly identified as assessable geographical geoabilities for competences. This paper offers a geography competence-oriented fieldtrip assessment framework. Project-based learning is chosen as the didactic approach, in which the fieldtrip project is built upon a real-world acute question of the students’ interest and choice, and solutions are reached following the enquiry learning method. The proposal brings cognitive domain (geographical thinking) and process (geospatial thinking) into alignment with geography and cross-cutting competences, corresponding geoabilities and geoskills, and learning outcomes in geography fieldtrips. The framework provides an assessment procedure (learning outcomes, tasks, and evidence) and tools (rubrics of evidence for learning outcomes) for fieldtrip geoskill assessment.

Role-Based Assignments Support Student Engagement during Geography Field Trips

Field trips, field courses, and other forms of field-based pedagogy have a long and storied history in geography and are frequently described as essential components of geographic education at the ...

Geography Field Trips: Why Getting Dirty Matters

Geography, as taught in schools, traditionally engages students in field trips which have a 'hands-on' approach towards exploring the physical and human environment. However, there is a trend towards running virtual field trips as sophisticated technologies enable more realistic on-line experiences. This investigation explores past and current literature about field trips and evaluates them against the aims of the Australian Geography Curriculum. The literature reveals that virtual field trips have the potential to offer equal and sometimes superior opportunities to meet the curriculum aims relating to knowledge and understanding. The literature also suggests that on-site field trips potentially offer a stronger emotional connection that may lead to realising the aims of respect, tolerance and informed and active citizenship beyond the classroom.

Being on Country as Protest: Designing a Virtual Geography Fieldtrip Guided by Jindaola

The fieldtrip has long been a key component of the geography curriculum, described as a 'touchstone' for learning in, on and about place Learning on Country provides an opportunity to embody Indigenous knowledges and experience places and people in field classes However, such opportunities are increasingly under threat as the costs and risks of running field trips have risen, and more recently, faced challenges such as those presented by the COVID-19 pandemic In this paper, we describe the transformation of a third-year undergraduate geography field trip into a virtual field trip using online resources We reflect on the processes and challenges of doing so in ways that privilege and respect Aboriginal pedagogies and practices in educational design Drawing on the philosophies and frameworks of Jindaola, an Aboriginal way of embedding Indigenous knowledges into the curriculum, we show how the virtual field trip, as a form of non-placement work-integrated learning, can embed place-based experiential learning into online learning contexts This paper outlines how the design, articulation and practice of that process is grounded in Country, culture and customs

Making Space for the Dissertation

This paper examines a residential writing retreat for final year human geography and planning students held in a youth hostel in North Yorkshire, considering how it is experienced by students. This is a curriculum innovation for the dissertation module that combines aspects of geography fieldtrip and writing workshop to support the dissertation writing process and build community, applicable to dissertation and other modules on all kinds of courses.
 Drawing on the concept of ‘the slow university’ (Berg & Seeber, 2016; O’Neill, 2014) where the ‘slowing down’ and ‘stripping away’ of the usual structures and patterns of teaching and learning create a critical and creative space for thinking and writing, we explore whether and how the Malham retreat makes space for writing. The study is also informed by our spatial approach to the processes and content of research and teaching as geographers (Massey, 2005).
 Qualitative focus group evidence was gathered on the student and staff experience and used to evaluate the field trip (Breen, 2006; Krueger & Casey, 2009; Stewart & Shamdasani, 2015). This paper presents the results of this evaluation and it is argued that the retreat made space for writing in three ways:
 1. The space of countryside, nature and youth hostel.
 2. The formal and informal learning spaces staff and students constructed during the retreat
 3. ‘Head space’- the social, psychological and emotional room the retreat made for staff and students

Secondary School Students' Attitudes toward the Geography Course

The objective of this study is to identify whether there is a statistically significant difference in secondary school students' attitudes toward the geography course on the basis of certain variables. The sample of the study was composed of a total of 899 students including 509 female students and 390 male students. The data were obtained through the 'Personal Information Form' which was created by the researcher and the 'Attitude Scale'. The findings demonstrated that there was a statistically significant difference in the attitude scores on the basis of the variables of 'age', 'class year', 'participation in geography field trips', 'satisfaction with teacher's use of student-centered active teaching in the course', 'playing orienteering game', 'use of social media', 'establishing relationship between media and geography' and 'establishing relationship between daily life and geography'. In conclusion, it was found that, in general, the secondary school students had moderately positive attitudes toward the geography course. It may be asserted that the female and male students developed similar attitudes towards the geography course. In addition to this, in this study, it was found that participation in geography trips positively affected the participants' desire to learn. Moreover, it was observed that the students who established a relationship between geography and daily life had a more positive attitude towards the geography course. Furthermore, the students who could establish a relationship between media and geography showed a much more positive attitude towards the geography course. It was determined that the secondary school students who were able to associate movies, TV series, news and game shows with geography had more positive attitudes towards the geography course.

Being on Country as Protest: Designing a Virtual Geography Fieldtrip Guided by Jindaola

The fieldtrip has long been a key component of the geography curriculum, described as a ‘touchstone’ for learning in, on and about place. Learning on Country provides an opportunity to embody Indigenous knowledges and experience places and people in field classes. However, such opportunities are increasingly under threat as the costs and risks of running field trips have risen, and more recently, faced challenges such as those presented by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we describe the transformation of a third-year undergraduate geography field trip into a virtual field trip using online resources. We reflect on the processes and challenges of doing so in ways that privilege and respect Aboriginal pedagogies and practices in educational design. Drawing on the philosophies and frameworks of Jindaola, an Aboriginal way of embedding Indigenous knowledges into the curriculum, we show how the virtual field trip, as a form of non-placement work-integrated learning, can embed place-based experiential learning into online learning contexts. This paper outlines how the design, articulation and practice of that process is grounded in Country, culture and customs.

Augmenting the landscape scene: students as participatory evaluators of mobile geospatial technologies

ABSTRACTThis paper provides a two-phase study to compare alternative techniques for augmenting landscape scenes on geography fieldtrips. The techniques were: a pre-prepared acetate overlay; a custom-designed mobile field guide; a locative media app on a smartphone; a virtual globe on a tablet PC; a head-mounted virtual reality display, and a geo-wand style mobile app. In one field exercise the first five techniques were compared through analysis of interviews and student video diaries, combined with direct observation. This identified a particular challenge of how to direct user attention correctly to relevant information in the field of view. To explore this issue in more detail, a second field exercise deployed “Zapp”, a bespoke geo-wand-style app capable of retrieving information about distant landscape features. This was evaluated using first-person video and spatial logging of in-field interactions. This paper reflects upon the relative merits of these approaches and highlights particular challenges of using technology to mimic a human field guide in pointing out specific aspects of the landscape scene. We also explore the role of students acting as design informants and research co-participants, which can be mutually beneficial in promoting a critical appreciation of the role of technology to support learning about the landscape.

Teaching ‘multiculturally’: geography as a basis for multicultural education in Korea

ABSTRACTAlong with its multicultural transformation, Korea is experiencing structural challenges of multicultural education that has been often criticized as assimilation driven and immigrant education oriented. In fact, multicultural education targeted at the Korean public should be as equally important as the newly arrived migrants, if not less. The paper seeks to identify existing complications of multicultural education in Korea by reviewing its practices in the sociopolitical context, while providing alternatives from the perspectives of geography. The importance of localization and place-based pedagogy is exemplified by the strength of geography education, emphasizing its compatibility and contributory potential to multicultural education. In addition, geography field trip lessons of Daegu that may be of interest to multicultural educators are presented as reference lessons in further developing multicultural education in Korea. By teaching multicultural education more ‘multiculturally,’ geography education not only outright reflects the richness of Korea’s growing cultural diversity, but also lends its flexibility nature and all-encompassing approaches to enhance social cohesion and inclusion.

A brave new world: considering the pedagogic potential of Virtual World Field Trips (VWFTs) in initial teacher education

Abstract In its broadest and historical sense, place-based education refers to education that occurs outside of the physical boundaries of a school building (Dewey 1910; Sobel 1996; Theobald 1997; Woodhouse and Knapp 2000). Place-based education, colloquially referred to as the ‘field trip’, is predominantly considered a pedagogic tool of the sciences. It involves a physical movement from the school-based location to a place of interest, for example, a geography field trip to an ecological landscape or science visit to a local museum. This paper considers the use of virtual world field trips (VWFTs) within the context of a pre-service Teacher Education programme. The paper presents data from one undergraduate module offered on a programme of initial teacher education. The paper identifies three significant elements of virtual world field trips: place, people and content. First, the virtual world can provide access to places not possible in the offline context as a result of geographic, economic or religious factors. Second, exposure to and dialogue with a variety of world views can challenge students’ assumptions, facilitate reflection and provide an opportunity for oneto-one teaching encounters. Third, from a teacher educator perspective, engagement in virtual world field trips can provide a space for teachers to model teaching methodologies and model creative learning techniques, thus providing student teachers with an insight into different approaches to teaching.

Toward an In-service Program for Inquiry-oriented Geography Field Trip

Toward an In-service Program for Inquiry-oriented Geography Field Trip

“Drawing in the sand” as a tool for teaching coastal geography

Field trips are recognized as an essential component of the study of geography. They are popular with learners and teachers, but their value as learning experiences is largely assumed. What is needed are interactive and relevant learning activities like “drawing in the sand,” a participatory learning activity that has been introduced into an undergraduate geography field trip at The University of Auckland. It allows students of the course to engage actively and reflectively with the very environment that they are studying.

Use of mobile technologies as support tools for geography field trips

In recent years, cellular phones and tablets have become increasingly more prevalent and popular. Due to their great mobility, light weight and ability to serve as a platform for various applications, these devices are ideal candidates for supporting out-of-classroom learning. Geography teachers in the twenty-first century must become familiar with these tools and must learn how to integrate them into their teaching, both in the classroom and in the field. Intelligent use of these tools can make classroom learning interesting and interactive and can transform the field trip into a stimulating and probing learning experience.This paper describes a course designed to train geography teachers to use the technological and pedagogical capabilities of mobile technologies to promote learning, with the goal of introducing mobile devices into the educational toolbox for geography field trips. The primary objective of the course was to enable geography education students to plan and carry out field trips that integrate mobile technologies and to teach them how to use these technologies in the educational activities they plan for the trips.The results of the research assessing the course indicate that technologies now available in mobile devices can be used to upgrade students’ learning abilities during field trips. The education students who took the course indicated that they planned to use these technologies on a regular basis in the future as an additional means of learning outside the classroom. They reported being able to produce activities on their own that optimally integrate the use of these technologies in field trip activities.

Four Days in Detroit: a Dutch urban geography field trip to the Motor City

This article describes a four day field trip to Detroit, Michigan with twenty-eight Urban Geography Master’s students from Utrecht University. Detroit is known for its population decline, industrial collapse and racial strife. However, the city is far more complex than that and understanding what happened to Detroit can teach us a lot about contemporary cities more generally. Each day of our visit built up a different narrative of Detroit and challenged what we thought we knew about the city and its people. This process evolved from the shocking scale of the ruins and destruction, to seeing this same landscape turned into art and hope, placing the city in a wider regional context and finally providing a reality check as to the city’s problems and potential solutions. Through our interactions and discussions with Detroiters, the students have come away with a great respect for the city and an understanding of why Detroit matters.

Tuning the field trip: audio-guided tours as a replacement for 1-day excursions in human geography

Educators are experiencing difficulties with 1-day field trips in human geography. Instead of teaching students how to apply theory in the field and learn to sense geography in everyday life, many excursions have degraded into tourist-like events where lecturers try to motivate rather passive students against a noisy urban backdrop. Although various (partly) student-led approaches have successfully addressed the issue, there are still a high number of tours that use a traditional, tutor-led model. The example of a series of three audio tours produced at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Germany, shows how these conventional field trips can be transformed into audio tours that help students not only to better internalize human geographic learning content but also cultivate empirical research, creative thinking, and individuality. In this paper I provide a critical description of tutor-led fieldtrips. Downsides are identified and contrasted with the audio-guided tours that an increasing number of museums create for their visitors. I then show, how learning from a narrator's voice instead of from a tour guide is also not only possible in the context of higher education but in many ways may be a superior learning tool. The concept of three interlinked audio tours is presented with regard to design, production, and distribution. The need of additional learning materials such as maps, posters, and workbooks to foster active learning through creative impulses and the independent use of empirical methods are discussed, before the successful implementation into the bachelor curriculum is described. I conclude by highlighting the importance of fieldwork and by recommending audio-guided tours as a productive method of active learning.

Doing Geography: A multimodal analysis of students' situated improvisational interpretation during fieldtrips

Abstract The popular conceptualisation of school fieldtrips as discrete events which students attend fails to recognise the complex sense-making processes in which students are engaged during fieldtrip activities. To address this shortcoming, we investigate the sense-making activities of two case-study groups of 14-year-old students during a Geography fieldtrip exploring urban heat islands. Throughout, they accessed an inquiry learning tool kit – nQuire – on netbooks. A contemporary form of sociocultural discourse analysis was employed. Our findings illustrate how students extended their classroom learning through the identification and solution of a range of emergent challenges: 1) what relevant data needs to be collected here? 2) where do we position ourselves, in relation to environmental features, to collect air temperature and carbon monoxide data? and 3) which surfaces do we collect infrared irradiance data from? We propose that situated improvisatory interpretation is a key feature of the resolution of these challenges. We offer significant extension to illustrate how students draw upon a wide range of multimodal resources to support improvisatory interpretation and we identify the role of bodily location in data collection. These findings make an important contribution to enhancing our understanding of the sense-making processes involved when doing Geography in the field.

Taking students outdoors to learn in high places

Fieldwork is an integral component of the geography degree. It is perceived by lecturers and students alike as an enjoyable, valuable learning experience outside in the real world. But what determines the type of field experiences we offer? To what extent is the fieldwork experience informed by best practice in pedagogy, research location and field, institutional practice/constraints, leader's outdoor experience, or a combination of all these and more? This paper offers a personal reflection on physical geography fieldtrip design in New Zealand, Britain and Spain involving New Zealand and British students over a period of 14 years, spanning two contrasting university systems and two institutions. A range of learning experiences is considered: residential and day trips, Cook's Tours and detailed investigations. These cover a range of academic and altitudinal levels from first year to final year undergraduate and from sea level to mountain top. Key drivers in the design and development of these field courses are considered in order to explore the reason for taking students to a plethora of ‘high places’, defined not only in the sense of altitude, but also in the sense of perceived intrinsic geographical value. The role played by the ‘great outdoors’ in fostering development of geographical knowledge is discussed by considering the notion that taking students outside to learn in ‘high places’ will automatically be of a cognitive advantage and intrinsically foster deeper levels of learning. The outdoor environment has much to offer the development of geographical knowledge among student cohorts, but care is required to maximise its potential.

A study on the experiences of university lecturers and students in the geography field trip

This study is a qualitative case study of a geography field trip of undergraduate geography students at Suleyman Demirel University. It conceives fieldwork as an experiential activity in which an understanding of the experiences of lecturers and students in their contexts is important. The aim was to enlighten the application of field trip method of undergraduate geography students and their lecturers. For this purpose, ‘semi-constructed interview form’ was used. The results of the study were analyzed by using content analyses procedure. Implications of these findings are discussed and evaluated in terms of geography education.