As teachers trainees, the authors were frustrated trying to create a lesson on the British Empire. But this challenge seems to be magnified ten-fold when teaching the history of Britain's empire: a complex political, cultural, social and economic phenomenon that has a broad chronological and geographical scope. And yet, despite the seemingly…

Concerned that her students' understanding of and engagement with remembrance were superficial, and faced with the requirement to teach SMSC and British values, Claire McKay sought ways to make them meaningful and contextualised. In this article she explores how she and her colleagues have endeavoured to do this, through a battlefields tour, and a…

Employability is a key issue for students and Higher Education Institutions and a key component of employability is possessing the skills a role requires. In the environmental sciences, fieldwork provides an opportunity for students to develop employability-enhancing technical and transferable skills. However, students can have difficulty…

This paper looks back at an academic-led language field trip project, now in its third year, involving ab-initio students of Italian at the University of Southampton. It considers the role of academic-led field trips in Modern Languages (ML) and it explores the underlying pedagogical approaches that were adopted to enhance students' engagement,…

Research into virtual field trips (VFTs) started in the 1990s but, only recently, the maturing technology of devices and networks has made them viable options for educational settings. By considering an experiment, the learning benefits of logging the movement of students within a VFT are shown. The data are visualized by two techniques:…

The paper proposes the notion of a "critical feel-trip" as a pedagogical narrative to entertain the relationships of experiential, affective and critical learning in field-based studies. It is argued that explicit mobilization of the triadic relations of these three modes of learning is a powerful way to strengthen students' appreciation…

In "Learning Outside the Primary Classroom," the educationalist and writer Fred Sedgwick explores in a practical way the many opportunities for intense learning that children and teachers can find outside the confines of the usual learning environment, the classroom. This original work is based on tried and tested methods from UK primary…

Popular myth has it that visiting a farm can be dangerous, but there are only a few occasions when children have become ill during a school visit to a farm. Simple, sensible precautions, including wearing appropriate clothing, such as trousers and wellington boots (if wet) or sensible shoes, and careful hand-washing, are all that is required. The…

In this paper we discuss the development and running of a residential animal behaviour field trip. The trip has a number of elements that challenge and develop the students. First, this trip is open to students at levels two, three and M. This allows us to engineer a certain amount of peer assisted learning. Second, the students live together and…

Teachers are forced to use state-adopted texts, approved materials and methods in order to facilitate learning. The creativity of designing a lesson plan that meets the needs of each student, while fostering the imagination and creativity, can be all but lost when constrained by such parameters. So what can teachers do to enhance the learning…

The School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham hosted the fifth annual conference in the "Innovative Language Teaching at University" series. Under the heading "Enhancing participation and collaboration" the conference, organised by Cecilia Goria, Oranna Speicher and Sascha Stollhans, took…

Within the project "Engaging mathematics for all learners", led and funded by the QCA, the mathematics team at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (Ri) looked into how mathematical tasks usually reserved for the "gifted and talented" can be used in the mainstream classroom with a wide range of learners to address core…

We have measured blood oxygenation levels in a group of 14 people (8 young people and 6 adults) on a physically demanding expedition to Mt Kenya. Blood oxygenation was measured at 11 different altitudes between 1910 and 4985 m using pulse oximetry. We found that pulse oximetry was suitable for use on a youth expedition and we were able to show…

This article is a condensed version of a commentary written to accompany a set of slides which describes the ammonia-soda process used by the ammonia-soda plant at Northwich of the United Kingdom. (HM)

Outlines how a structured visit to the supermarket can support the scientific study of food and farming. Describes various ways that teachers can use an industry-produced curriculum package in conjunction with a field trip to the grocery store and classroom study. (WRM)