This article focuses on the relationship between coursework and field experience, theory and practice. Guided by Korthagen et al.'s (2006) fundamental principles for teacher education, an alternative student teaching structure was tested at the Universite´ du Que´bec en Outaouais (Canada) in the Fall 2016 term. An online survey was conducted to…

This pilot project examines the experiences of a small sample (n = 4) of elementary pre-service teachers (PSTs) as they designed and attempted to implement a series of short lessons, or mini-units, using Ozobots or Makey Makeys during their field experience. Results indicated that, despite the fact that none of the PSTs were able to deliver their…

In 2018 a teacher education program at a small research university implemented three initiatives to improve the practicum experience for teacher candidates. This program evaluation focusses on one of three initiatives, specifically, peer-oriented triads during practicum. The faculty members used the Spiral of Inquiry (Kaser & Halbert, 2017) as…

In this collaborative professor-student contribution, an experiential nature-based university psychology course is described and discussed. Existing scholarship on experiential environmental education informed the course, with the overall aim of educating the "whole student". Experiential environmental education has been identified as…

Field instruction is a crucial component of natural sciences education. The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted many university courses to an online format, significantly impacting field instruction. FRST 350, "Foundational Field School," is an 8-day University of British Columbia Forestry field course taught to incoming transfer students from…

Plant identification is a critical skill for students in biological sciences, especially forestry. Many students begin with limited plant identification abilities and struggle to learn this skill. To support student learning of identification and ecological characteristics of important forest plants in an undergraduate forest ecology course at the…

Field courses are a critical component of many post-secondary programs in British Columbia and an important option in many others. They are widely recognized for their pedagogical value, mostly because it has been found that students generally achieve more high-level learning, and they retain more of what they learn, in a field-course setting than…

This article describes a community service learning collaboration between a teacher education program and a nonprofit literacy society. Seventeen teacher candidates (TCs) tutored young readers weekly for seven months as part of their course-related field experience and completed reflective assignments analyzing their own learning and the learning…

This paper investigates the prevalence of fieldwork in undergraduate Geography programs in Canada. It examines the presence of fieldwork, provided through both field courses and courses that include fieldwork components, by reviewing program requirements and course offerings in undergraduate geography programs. The research explores the extent to…

Creating behavior change to mobilize transitions toward sustainability is a significant challenge of our time. Inspired by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Farmer Field School, we developed a novel community-based education program to engage people in local sustainability topics. In the Sustainable Communities Field School…

Many geoscience educators have noted the difficulty that students experience in transferring their classroom knowledge to the field environment. The Geoscience Garden, on the University of Alberta North Campus, provides a simulated field environment in which Earth Science students can develop field observation skills, interpret features of Earth's…

Geography is a product of colonial processes, and in Canada, the exclusion from educational curricula of Indigenous worldviews and their lived realities has produced "geographies of ignorance". Transformative learning is an approach geographers can use to initiate changes in non-Indigenous student attitudes about Indigenous…

This article reports on a study designed to validate the Gatekeeping Attitude Index, a 14-item Likert scaling index. The authors collected data from a convenience sample of social work field instructors (N = 188) with a response rate of 74.0%. Construct validation by exploratory factor analysis identified a 2-factor solution on the index after…

This research paper reports the findings from an international survey of fieldwork practitioners on their use of technology to enhance fieldwork teaching and learning. It was found that there was high information technology usage before and after time in the field, but some were also using portable devices such as smartphones and global…

In this study, 58 undergraduate and graduate students at 1 Canadian school of social work voluntarily completed a survey at the conclusion of their academic year consisting of open- and closed-ended questions intended to examine their exposure to trauma during the course of their field practice. The authors discovered that the majority of students…