Way Off Campus Education

Those of you that participated in the Seminar on College Teaching retreat at the Bodega Marine Lab have had a taste of the experiences about which I will blog. When you take education away from campus, you experience teaching and learning in a whole different, and I think more valuable, way. In addition to the SCT at Bodega, I have had opportunities as both a student and a teacher to learn in off campus settings that add a intensity to education that you just cannot achieve in a traditional classroom. I was inspired to write about way off campus experiences by three recent events: 1) reminiscing about learning aboard a sailing school vessel with a fellow survivor (although of a rival program) during an afternoon at the wine bar, 2) a sweet card that my advisor shared with me from a former student of ours who discovered how capable she really was during one of our BML classes, and 3) being seated next to a former student of mine at a recent wedding and hearing from her that she had doubts about sticking with biology until she took the field class at Shoals.

I have tried to find a label for the type of education that I am describing here. My first thought was 'experiential learning' and certainly some of the concepts of that theory are put to use in these off campus experiences. In experiential learning, students participate in an activity in some way related to set educational goals, then they are asked to reflect or report on the activity and what they have taken away from it. There's a great wikipedia entry on this educational theory - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiential_learning - and while reading through that and other web resources, I realized that that label didn't quite fit. While the off campus experiences that I will describe contain hands-on activities and sometimes forums for reflection, that is not all that they are about. And, in similar ways, 'hands-on education' isn't a good fit either. While all the experiences rely heavily on hands-on learning, these off campus experiences take hands-on to a whole new level. Also, many of the experiences contain 'active learning' by necessity, but this too is a simplification of the overall experience. I think that the label with the closest fit would be 'immersion learning'. While this term is most often used to refer to the learning of foreign language by immersing oneself completely in that culture, it fits well because in the off campus experiences that I will describe the students and instructors are very much immersed in science. They are living together completely surrounded by their learning experience and, in a way, the students are learning foreign languages - scientific names, sailing and navigation terms, or the language of scientific research. The success of the students depends, in part, to their willingness and ability to adapt to this foreign setting and immerse themselves in the learning.

So, I will continue to use my made-up term off campus learning/educational experience, but it is a bit cumbersome and a little vague. Keep in mind the concept of immersion education because I think that, in many ways, this is a pretty accurate description. I will blog about three very different off campus science educational experiences - two of which I had the opportunity to participate in as an undergraduate student and two of which I have had a hand in instructing. I will first compare teaching classes at marine labs 3000 miles apart. Then I'll chat a bit about the Research Experience for Undergraduates program supported by the National Science Foundation. And finally, I'll blog about learning on the high seas aboard sailing school vessels.