School Field Trips Research Articles

From the Editor

From the Editor

The impact of a museum travelling exhibition on middle school teachers and students from rural, low-income homes

Schools may be places of learning, but a great deal of learning occurs outside of school. A growing body of literature investigates how school field trips allow rural students to make real-life connections with their school curriculum. This paper contributes to that area of research by describing how students from five middle schools in the United States responded to a travelling museum exhibition hosted at a non-museum site. The authors explore the impact of the exhibition on students from poor, rural backgrounds, discussing how it helped them to engage with themes such as freedom of expression, democracy, citizenship and Holocaust education. The results show that, by connecting curricular content with real-life situations, field trips such as this have the potential to change not only students’ understanding of the curriculum, but also their teachers’ estimation of their abilities.

A space-time journey through the composite Conero Geosite (Marche, Italy): a tool for teaching Earth Sciences at school

This work is part of a PhD project devoted to promoting the study of Earth Sciences at schools by presenting significant geosites in the Marche Region. The Mount Conero geosite, with several outcrops and geological trails, offers teachers prime locations for showing the most interesting moments of the geological evolution of the region, from the Cretaceous to the Pleistocene, and can serve as a springboard for introducing a variety of geoscience topics related to the major themes of Earth sciences courses at schools. These outcrops also meet certain requirements for school field trips, in terms of logistics, appeal, availability of data, and they can be modulated for students of different ages. Teachers can avail themselves of general, specific, and interdisciplinary teaching material at different school levels (http://d7.unicam.it/teachingearthsciences/) for the field trips and class activities.

Short- and long-term outreach at the zoo: cognitive learning about marine ecological and conservational issues

Although zoos envision themselves as environmental education institutions and governmental policies require that students become environmentally responsible citizens, it is surprising, that little research is done with regard to school field trips to the zoo. Many students are not aware that their everyday life affects marine environments that may enhance through spatially disconnection from marine ecosystems. A zoo field trip may overcome this disconnection. Considering knowledge as prerequisite for environmental attitudes and behavior, our study focused on cognitive learning of high school students at an instructional zoo field trip about marine ecology and conservation, by applying two cooperative learning settings. The study followed a quasi-experimental design, applying multiple-choice pre-post-retention tests. The results show satisfying short- and long-term knowledge achievement. Our cooperative learning settings seems to be a suitable approach for zoo field trips to facilitate a satisfying cognitive outcome concerning marine ecology and conservational issues.

Outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7 Infections Associated with Dairy Education Event Attendance - Whatcom County, Washington, 2015.

On April 27, 2015, the Whatcom County Health Department (WCHD) in Bellingham, Washington, was notified by a local laboratory regarding three children with presumptive Escherichia coli O157 infection. WCHD interviewed the parents, who indicated that all three children had attended a dairy education event held in a barn April 20–24, 2015, during a school field trip. WCHD, the Washington State Department of Health, and CDC investigated to determine the magnitude of the outbreak, identify risk factors and potential environmental sources of infection, and develop recommendations. A total of 60 cases (25 confirmed and 35 probable) were identified, and 11 patients were hospitalized.

Willy Maykit in Space by Greg Trine (review)

Reviewed by: Willy Maykit in Space by Greg Trine April Spisak Trine, Greg Willy Maykit in Space; illus. by James Burks. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015 [208p] ISBN 978-0-544-31351-4 $13.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 3-5 Fourth-grader Willy misses his father desperately after his pop is lost during a research trip to the Amazon, but he still really wants to be able to travel to Planet Ed on a school field trip. Mom reluctantly agrees to let another of her loved ones venture far from home, but her worst fears are realized when Willy is left behind on a faraway planet after bad weather cuts the trip short. Luckily, Willy’s not alone; he has a few strong allies including a kind, funny extraterrestrial, a schoolmate (his crush!), and an android who only recently discovered the addictive magic of knock-knock jokes (astute readers may remember their own exhausting enthusiasm upon first learning to tell jokes). Together, they fend off giant monsters and manage to keep alive until they are rescued. The pace is just right, with quick scene changes keeping things moving toward what will obviously be a happy ending. The frequent illustrations break up the text effectively and also work to present the monsters as, ultimately, ridiculous and defeatable, rather than terrifying. Dad’s parallel story takes an awkwardly colonialist turn in the descriptions of the savage dark-skinned “foothunters” of the deep jungle, but the rest of the novel is effortlessly diverse in open, friendly ways, and the two stories of bold adventurers headed back toward [End Page 469] home are exhilarating. Readers seeking a speedy space thriller and fans of Trine’s other series will be well pleased with this outing. Copyright © 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Sparks and Shocks: Replicas of Historical Instruments in Museum Education

This paper discusses the variety of ways in which The Bakken Museum has made use of replicas or simulations of historical instruments and experiments and demonstrations in education programs and exhibits for school children, families with children, and other museum audiences. Early efforts were stimulated in the mid-1980s by a collaboration with Prof. Samuel Devons, who pioneered the use of historical experiments at his “History of Science Laboratory” at Barnard College (Columbia University). This collaboration resulted in a series of summer institutes for high school science teachers which incorporated historical simulations. An “Eighteenth-Century Electricity Kit” aimed at middle schools also was produced. Beginning in the early 1990s, versions of these historically-based instruments and experiments and demonstrations were successfully integrated into school field trip programs and to a degree in school-based outreach programs developed in the late 1990s; topics include static electricity, batteries and bioelectricity, and magnetism/electromagnetism. “Science theater” programs such as puppet shows, first-person interpretations (e.g., Benjamin Franklin, Mary Shelley), and short plays (“War of the Currents”) also utilize historical simulations. A new exhibit, “Ben Franklin’s Electricity Party”, uses classic eighteenth-century electrostatic instruments to engage visitors. These various uses will be analyzed in terms of their effectiveness, the question of historical authenticity, how they compare with similar uses at other museums, and how they are integrated with historical stories.

Intermediate school's trip to India: Preparing for competence

In November 2010, students from a Palmerston North intermediate school embarked on a 2-week excursion to India. Qualitative research was carried out before, during and after the trip. Results discussed in this article focus primarily on the students' account of their trip, especially their perceived cultural competence and their explanation for it. Accounts of their competence are also offered by the parents and teachers, for example, they especially valued the students' extensive school-based preparation. Insights gained from the experiences of this trip may be applied to other, including older, cohorts of students embarking on overseas school field trips.

Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin: The Spirituals and the Empty Archive

Missing Paul Robeson in East BerlinThe Spirituals and the Empty Archive Todd Carmody (bio) You may well ask why Paul Robeson means so much to our people. Why do we have a Paul Robeson committee or a Paul Robeson Archive? Why do our school children learn about him and why is he an inspiration to us on our road to communism? I am not sure that I have the whole answer to these questions. But surely one reason is what we learned from the terrible experiences under fascism. —Frank Loeser, President of East Germany’s Paul Robeson Committee, Ansprache zur Veranstaltung “What Is America To Me,” August 2, 1973, 19:30, Kosmos Theater In 1965 East Berlin’s Academy of the Arts established the Paul Robeson Archive, honoring a prominent African American singer and activist who visited the German Democratic Republic on but three occasions. Robeson traveled to the GDR twice for state ceremonies in 1960 and again for medical convalescence a few years later. Each of these trips was brief, and during his final stay Robeson saw no visitors and made no public appearances. East Berlin may thus seem an unlikely site for the Robeson Archive; Robeson’s ties to the socialist German state were not especially strong and never as well established as his links to Britain or the Soviet Union, or even to other Soviet satellite states. But surprising though its location may be, the collection amassed by the East German Academy of the Arts is extensive. Among the academy’s holdings are a handful of private letters and candid photographs, audio outtakes and reading notes—ephemeral traces of an everyday life shaded from the glare of international celebrity. Personal artifacts like these, comparatively rare in the Robeson collection, lend the past a comforting sense of familiarity. They encourage us to imagine the archive qua cultural institution as a space in which distant histories are rendered immediate and where we might, taking the singular object in hand, better grasp the lived experiences of those who have [End Page 1] come before us. The romance of the archive is this promise of proximity. As Carolyn Steedman writes, “You think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in” (19). Most of the academy’s holdings, however, offer no such intimacy. The archive in Berlin might best be described, in fact, as a transatlantic paper trail. More bibliography than reliquary, it contains thousands of photocopied newspaper articles, scholarly essays, and popular books. These documents are generally about rather than by Robeson, and most duplicate materials readily accessible elsewhere. While a few of Robeson’s personal papers and belongings made their way to East Berlin, most of the materials were obtained by diligent archivists and administrators tasked with tracking down anything and everything written about Robeson.1 Founded not by bequest but by request, the Robeson Archive is thus awash in photocopies and offprints, desk copies and microfilms. The sheer volume of secondary materials gives pause. Why would the cultural arm of the East German government go to such lengths to commemorate an American dissident who was often invited but rarely visited? What purpose could an archive of photocopies serve? Internal memos suggest that preservation and pedagogy were guiding concerns from the start. Claiming in the mid-1950s that “reactionary imperialist forces” were endangering Robeson’s legacy, for example, the board charged with “Founding a Committee to Create a Paul Robeson Archive” declared the urgency of “collecting and evaluating the entire documentary record of his achievement” before it was too late (Konzeption).2 As Victor Grossman, director of the archive from 1965 to 1968, would later recount: “The Robesons had been targeted by cold war hatred and racism in the United States, and this archive was meant as a rejoinder” (2003, 176). Initial proposals also called for materials in the archive to be made widely available. Citizens of East Berlin and the environs could visit the collections in person; school field trips were an especially high priority. Genossen in other parts of the country were to be reached with traveling exhibitions and museum loans. In each of these instantiations, the archive would seek to “objectively document” the...

Fields of dreams Four Fields Tim Dee Jonathan Cape, 2013. 288 pp.

Fields of dreams <b>Four Fields</b> <i>Tim Dee</i> Jonathan Cape, 2013. 288 pp.

Introducing Future Teachers to Science Beyond the Classroom

Informal science education institutions (ISEIs), such as museums, aquariums, and nature centers, offer more to teachers than just field trip destinations—they have the potential to provide ideas for pedagogy, as well as support deeper development of teachers’ science knowledge. Although there is extensive literature related to teacher/museum interactions within the context of the school field trip, there is limited research that examines other ways that such institutions might support classroom teachers. A growing number of studies, however, examine how incorporating such ideas of connections of ISEIs to pre-service teacher education might improve teacher perceptions and awareness. Pre-service elementary teachers enrolled in a science methods class participated in a semester-long assignment which required participation in their choice of activities and events (workshops, field trips, family day activities) conducted at local ISEIs. Students generally saw this embedded assignment as beneficial, despite the additional out-of-class time required for completion. Comparison of pre-/post-class responses suggested that teachers shifted their perceptions of ISEIs as first and foremost as places for field trips or hands-on experiences, to institutions that can help teachers with classroom science instruction. Although basic awareness of the existence of such opportunities was frequently cited, teachers also recognized these sites as places that could enhance their teaching, either by providing materials/resources for the classroom or by helping them learn (content and pedagogy) as teachers. Implications for practice, including the role of ISEIs in teacher preparation and indication, are also discussed.

What is the evidence that hydroxyurea improves health-related quality of life in patients with sickle cell disease?

A 10-year-old male patient with homozygous sickle cell disease presents for a follow-up clinic visit after a recent hospitalization for a painful vasoocclusive event. His parents mention that in the past year he has had 4 hospitalizations for vasoocclusive events, 2 of which were complicated by the development of acute chest syndrome that resulted in transfer to the intensive care unit. He has missed many school days and may be retained a grade this year. He feels particularly sad about missing the school field trip that occurred during his last hospitalization. He also reports that he is not able to keep up with his friends when participating in physical activities at school. The child's parents are worried that he may be depressed. You as the provider discuss the option of hydroxyurea therapy. His parents ask if hydroxyurea would improve his overall well-being and functioning.

What is the evidence that hydroxyurea improves health-related quality of life in patients with sickle cell disease?

Abstract A 10-year-old male patient with homozygous sickle cell disease presents for a follow-up clinic visit after a recent hospitalization for a painful vasoocclusive event. His parents mention that in the past year he has had 4 hospitalizations for vasoocclusive events, 2 of which were complicated by the development of acute chest syndrome that resulted in transfer to the intensive care unit. He has missed many school days and may be retained a grade this year. He feels particularly sad about missing the school field trip that occurred during his last hospitalization. He also reports that he is not able to keep up with his friends when participating in physical activities at school. The child's parents are worried that he may be depressed. You as the provider discuss the option of hydroxyurea therapy. His parents ask if hydroxyurea would improve his overall well-being and functioning.

Museum learning via social and mobile technologies: (How) can online interactions enhance the visitor experience?

AbstractKey to introducing information and communication technologies in museums is to support meaning‐making activity in encounters with artefacts. The study presented in this paper is exploratory in nature and investigates the use of social and mobile technologies in school field trips as a means of enhancing the visitor experience. It is anchored in sociocultural perspectives of learning as meaning making, with a focus on mediating artefacts in the development of understanding. The Museum of London was selected as the site of the study and the participants were a Year 9 History class (13–14 years old) in a secondary school in Milton Keynes. The paper considers evidence of meaning making from students’ online posts on Twitter (http://twitter.com) and activity on‐site. Observational data, the visit's Twitter stream and post‐visit interview data with the participants are presented and analysed. A mixed‐method approach is employed to interpret the museum visit and examine young people's experience in the museum. Such an approach allows useful insights and shapes the understanding of how social and mobile technologies have an impact on the social dynamics of a school trip to a museum. Specifically, it explains the role of such tools in fostering the social interactions around museum artefacts and ultimately the process of shared construction of meaning making.Practitioner Notes What is already known about this topic School field trips are an important means of introducing young people to museum collections and have long‐term learning impact and influence perceptions. Learning in museums is conceptualised as the construction of meaning. Making meaning is a social practice—people engage with their environment and each other through “socially made and culturally specific resources, in ways that arise out of their interests” (Kress, ). Facilitating the visitors’ meaning‐making process is key to introducing new technologies in museums (Kaptelinin, ). Use of mobile tools in museum facilitates inquiry activities such as exploration, information search, communication and experience documenting (Hsi, ). Many information technologies implemented in museum and field trips fail to meet the real needs of their users (Gammon &amp; Burch, ) and may appear to isolate visitors and inhibit social interaction (vom Lehn &amp; Heath, ). What this paper adds Explores the use of social and mobile technologies at the interface of formal and informal contexts in K‐12 education. Provides an example of “enforced” mobile usage (Rushby, ) with empirical evidence on how social and mobile technologies could be integrated in school field trips to museums. Focuses on a learning design that allows learners to switch between different contexts (offline/online; individual/social; formal/informal) and extend the social spaces in which learners interact with each other. Employs a mixed‐method approach in analysing content generated online in a school visit to a museum. Contributes to a research agenda for mobile learning and particularly in designing and studying “seamless learning spaces”. Implications for practice and/or policy The findings will contribute to museum education initiatives for effective use of social and mobile tools within school programmes. Indicates the potential of the “interconnected opinion space” and “archival space” in designing museum programmes for meaning making across contexts. Highlights the need to develop more effective pedagogic strategies that will anticipate and encourage the ways that young people use social and mobile technologies and at the same time minimise the tension between the contexts, the content and the mediation tools.

초등교사의 해양수족관 현장학습에 대한 인식과 해양수족관의 교육적 기능

Marine aquariums are excellent venues for accomplishing the purpose of marine education, and school field trips conducted at non-formal settings continue to be an important part of K-12 education. The purpose of this study is to provide quantitative data regarding the extent and quality of marine aquarium field trips conducted by elementary school teachers in Seoul. A web survey designed to explore elementary school teachers` experiences and perspectives on aquarium field trips identified several concerns regarding Korean marine aquarium education. Discussions for both Korean aquaria`s educational roles and Korean elementary schools` successful field trips to aquaria are presented with the goal of improving the quality of Korean marine aquarium education.

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.

A Qualitative Study of Agricultural Literacy in Urban Youth: What Do Elementary Students Understand about the Agri–food System?

Agricultural literacy of K–12 students is a national priority for both scientific and agricultural education professional organizations. Development of curricula to address this priority has not been informed by research on what K–12 students understand about the agri–food system. While students’ knowledge of food and fiber system facts have been studied, in–depth research into broader student understandings of the system have largely been ignored. This study employed semi–structured interviews to compare urban elementary students' understandings with nationally developed benchmarks for agri–food system literacy. Findings indicate that no participant had ever grown their own food, raised a plant, or cared for an animal. Participation in school fieldtrips to farms or a visit to a relative’s garden were the most frequently mentioned agricultural experience. Participants could readily name common food items, but could not accurately elaborate on the origins of common foods. Post–production activities, like food processing, were not well understood. Students’ agriculturally related experiences did not appear to influence their understanding about where food comes from or what happens to food as it travels from farm to plate.

Myartspace: Design and evaluation of support for learning with multimedia phones between classrooms and museums

This paper presents a description and evaluation of Myartspace, a service on mobile phones for inquiry-led learning that allows students to gather information during a school field trip which is automatically sent to a website where they can view, share and present it, back in the classroom or at home. The evaluation focused on three levels: a micro level, concerned with issues of usability; a meso level, which examined educational effectiveness in terms of learning breakthroughs and breakdowns; and a macro level, which looked at the impact of the new technology on school museum visits practice. Issues of implementing mobile learning across school and museum settings are identified and cross-level influences are discussed. The study showed that the service was effective in enabling students to gather information in a museum and this provided resources for effective construction and reflection in the classroom. Minor usability problems did not detract from the learning, however there are significant issues concerning how to structure the visit and on the viability of Myartspace as a regular service.

Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson (review)

Reviewed by: Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson John Vickrey Van Cleve (bio) Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson, by Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007, 304 pp., hardcover, $27.50. ISBN 978-0-8078-3155-7) Language is essential to American jurisprudence. When defendants lack the ability to receive and convey language, they cannot be tried fairly, and yet they may represent a threat to the public safety. Donald Lang's story, the subject of the 1979 movie Dummy, exemplifies this dilemma. Deaf and without command of a written or a signed language, he was accused in 1965 of murdering a Chicago prostitute. He was found incompetent to stand trial, however, because he could not communicate with his deaf lawyer, Lowell Myers, or testify on his own behalf. The state then committed him to a mental institution, but Myers successfully challenged this placement. Subsequently, the Illinois Department of Mental Health tried to teach Lang American Sign Language, though he remained confined. In 1970 the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that Lang could not be held indefinitely without being convicted of a crime. By then, five years after the first incident, the state's primary witness against Lang had died, and Lang still did not know ASL. Illinois gave up and released Lang back into the community. A few months later he was charged with murdering another prostitute. The Illinois Supreme Court eventually determined, in a complex decision based on the specific facts of these events, that Lang could be held until he was no longer a threat to the [End Page 367] community or until he had learned to communicate well enough to contribute to his own defense. However, no such legal wrangling and agonized reasoning surrounded the initial incarceration and castration of another deaf African American, Junius Wilson, as Susan Burch and Hannah Joyner write in this tragic tale of deafness, language, race, and family. Junius Wilson was born in 1908 into an impoverished African American family in the small community of Castle Hayne, near Wilmington, North Carolina. Burch and Joyner eloquently evoke the horrific life faced by African Americans in that part of the South in the early twentieth century, as whites reasserted their dominance with riots, lynchings, and routine intimidation. The authors also describe the specifics of Wilson's personal and family situation. Wilson's father, Sydney, and his male friends in Castle Hayne earned money by cutting wood for the railroad company. Chief among these friends was a close neighbor, Arthur Smith Sr., whose son, Arthur Jr., also a woodcutter, would play a key role in determining Wilson's future. Wilson was discovered to be deaf in his early childhood and learned neither speech nor a sign language in his home environment. When he reached the mandatory school attendance age of eight, he was sent to the North Carolina School for the Colored Blind and Deaf in Raleigh, a residential institution supervised by a nonsigning, hearing white man who championed oralism, refused to hire deaf instructors, and emphasized vocational education over academic preparation for black students. As late as 1932, Burch and Joyner write, the Raleigh school had not graduated any students. Most apparently either withdrew or were dismissed because of alleged feeblemindedness, but Wilson was expelled for another reason. During a school field trip to the Negro State Fair in Raleigh in 1924, sixteen-year-old Wilson ran away and did not return to school for two nights and one day. The administration dismissed him for this act of rebellion. It is not clear what Wilson learned in his nearly eight years at the Raleigh institution. When he was an adult, he could read and write only a few words. Burch and Joyner do not mention any particular acquired vocational skills. He did not speak intelligibly or speechread. He did learn some sign language, but it was a dialect peculiar to the Raleigh school's students. Decades after his expulsion, sympathetic, [End Page 368] fluent, native deaf users of ASL were able to communicate with Wilson only in a limited way. They could neither understand with certainty what he tried to convey, nor, apparently, could he understand them...

Scat (review)

Reviewed by: Scat Karen Coats Hiaasen, Carl Scat. Knopf, 2009 [384p] Library ed. ISBN 978-0-375-93486-5$19.99 Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-375-83486-8$16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9 It's not that he doesn't like biology, but Nick dreads his hours with Mrs. Starch, the infamous, rumor-encrusted biology teacher. Still, when she embarrasses the class bully, Smoke, Nick fears for her, especially when she disappears from a school field trip to a local swamp. The class had to cut the trip short because of a fire in the swamp, and many of his classmates figure that Smoke started it. As Nick and his friend Marta investigate the disappearance of their teacher, they run into someone driving her car and intimating that he's her nephew, even though they know she doesn't have family. As it turns out, Smoke, Mrs. Starch, and the mysterious "nephew" are all connected, but it's not for the reason Nick imagines. Nor are the dangers where he imagined, either; an unscrupulous would-be oil tycoon from Texas is trying to sink a well in public land and will do just about anything to keep people from discovering his plans. With his usual flair, Hiaasen blends endangered species (this time a Florida panther), uniquely Floridian landscapes, and environmental mystery into an intricate plot web, laying out multiple strands before pulling them up tightly into a resolution that turns the kids into the latest media heroes. Along the way, he stretches and twists factual details in tall-tale fashion, sacrificing absolute credibility for an exciting climax. His secondary characters tend toward the hyberbolic as well, neatly situating the quirky alongside the earnest everykids who are his protagonists. Fans of Hoot (BCCB 11/02) and Flush (BCCB 10/05) will cheer for Scat. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois