This article describes an ethical dilemma that one member of a middle school teaching team, Jill Vega, experienced, and outlines the way she resolved the issue. Vega's colleague, Nancy Smart, a new and energetic young teacher, designed a cross-curricular experiential learning trip to extend classroom learning in the field by providing valuable…

Extension personnel, agricultural companies, and contract researchers invest a great deal of resources through time, money, and manpower to educate crop consultants, producers, students, and new employees. Creating an in-field, real world, and hands-on learning environment affords an opportunity to engage individuals to learn in ways that cannot…

Culturally enriching field trips matter. They produce significant benefits for students on a variety of educational outcomes that schools and communities care about. This experiment on the effects of field trips to see live theater demonstrates that seeing plays is an effective way to teach academic content; increases student tolerance by…

Technology-oriented company visits could potentially provide children with a stimulating "real-world" setting to develop more broad and positive images of and attitudes toward technology and technical professions. The present study was the first to explore whether children's images of and attitudes toward technology, technical…

In this article the authors share advice from the viewpoints of both a formal and informal educator that will help teachers identify the right Informal Science Institutions (ISIs)--institutions that specialize in learning that occurs outside of the school setting--to maximize their students' learning and use informal education to their…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the views of the prospective biology teachers about the field trip to Kazdagi National Park. Participants were 12 prospective Biology teachers studying in Necatibey Faculty of Education in Balikesir University, Turkey. A semi-structured interview form was used as a data collection instrument. Data were…

Realizing that ESOL students often do not integrate naturally into their new communities, we developed a reading class that focuses only on topics such as history, culture, arts, nature and entertainment that pertain to Portland or Oregon. In addition to readings, we asked that students go out and "live" what they learned through a…

In principle, the research-teaching nexus should be seen as a two-way link, showing not only ways in which research supports teaching but also ways in which teaching supports research. In reality, the discussion has been limited almost entirely to the first of these practices. This paper presents a case study in which some student field-trip…

Concepts relating to outer space are difficult to grasp because we lack direct experience of this environment. We analysed students' understanding of gravitation on Earth and beyond by testing the effect of training on it. In a pretest (T1), 28 seventh graders answered a questionnaire about space concepts. They all then underwent the same formal…

Outdoor Education (OE) and Experiential Education (EE) programs are becoming increasingly popular in Victorian schools. This article is derived from findings that emerged through the interpretation of case study data gathered for my doctoral thesis of a three-phased, non-residential, EE program. This interpretation process highlighted five themes,…

The Greenwich Academy (Connecticut), an all-girls school, is more quickly characterized as traditional than as progressive. This article presents four examples of how the Academy has endeavored in recent years to make learning experiential for their students. These four areas are: (1) GAINS (Girls Advancing In STEM); (2) Fourth Grade Classroom…

This paper examines the pedagogical and practical challenges associated with teaching historical geography, and archival research specifically, in the context of the undergraduate field trip. In so doing, it draws upon students' own reflections on the experience of conducting archival research during a field trip to New York City and presents the…

Namibia's cheetah population has predominantly been threatened by human conflict related to livestock farming and habitat loss. Cheetahs have been indiscriminately persecuted as a mortal threat to livestock, as well as suffered from human-caused land use change. The Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) in Otjiwarongo, Namibia conducts cheetah research…

This paper examines the experience of an action research "Study Day" to investigate development of a culture of reflective practice among educators. Shared recognition of the importance of reflective practice in education is now a well-established part of both pre-service preparation and in-service work experience for educators. Osterman…

The authors point out a basic contradiction: On one hand, we want to keep children as safe as possible; On the other, they suggest, learning to take risks is a normal part of childhood and child development. In Norway, research has shown that early-childhood education and care (ECEC) practitioners have, in the past, taken a permissive approach to…