School Trips

School trips can be educational and a refreshing change of scenery for students studying in a semester-long or other length intensive course.  School trips augment the course materials and provide reinforcement for lessons learned are being learned by establishing a thematic connection as well as a sense of unity of theory and practice—depending upon the course and on the school trips planned.

One summer, as a supplement to advancement courses for at-risk high school students, one community college teaching team ushered the students to the Steinhart Aquarium and then on to the Haight Ashbury District—both in San Francisco, California.

Students were provided round-trip transportation, free bag lunches, entrance tickets to the aquarium, itineraries, disposable cameras and guide sheets (for the “Summer of Love” segment of the excursion), and adult escorts (one adult for every five students).

At the aquarium, the tour involved a rare behind-the-scenes walk-through, which entailed two trained and practiced aquarium staff speaking on the various marine life that were kept in special tanks and pools in the underground channels of the aquarium; and a free roaming period for observing the public tanks.  Some students made use of the cameras, taking photographs (where allowed), for example, in the Skulls exhibit room, where over 1,500 skulls of various mammals are displayed on gallery-style walls.

For the “Summer of Love” leg of the tour—which the students did after lunch—each was guided by handout that contained information for a Haight Street scavenger hunt: each landmark had a historical background and was to be “found” and photographed (for a Photoshop session upon return to the school).  In addition, the students had read a “Hippie Timeline”, which stimulated their interest in the arts, the music, the literature, and the legal, social, and political atmosphere of the period.  (The timeline was taken from hippy.com.)

From the infamous Haight/Ashbury sign to the famous murals, from the mannequin legs kicking out an open widow over the Piedmont Shop to the renowned Red Victorian, the students followed clues, made observations, sketched or photographed, and participated in the re-tracing of the 60s and 70s in particular and history in general.

From civil rights acts and black student arrests to the music of Bob Dylan and the onset of LSD research to Kennedy, Johnson, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X to the founding of Amnesty of International and the Vietnam War—the students found visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and other materials for art projects, English assignments, Study Skills work, and even Career exploration.

These combination school trips, then, contributed to a learning experience that in turn contributed to outcome-based “products”… short films, digital photography, journaling and reviews, and comprehensive evaluations.