Learning Expeditions: Rethinking Field Trips (Transcript)

Jill: Every week our students go on some type of Learning Expedition to somewhere in our community, whether students are on Main Street and visiting a fire station and a hair salon to learn about physical and chemical changes; or whether they’re studying the habitats of rain forest animals at the zoo, the learning that takes place in their classroom then comes to life through these Expeditions.

Rachel: We are partnered with seven museums. We work with their educators to help enrich our curriculum and to find connections that are natural.

Jennifer: We went to the zoo for one of our Learning Expeditions. They offer a lot of rain forest animals. And we were able to also talk about map skills, as that’s a standard that we need to cover. They were trying to find their animal on the map, understand what rain forest they were coming from, why different rain forests have different types of animals.

Rachel: There’s a big difference between a field trip and a Learning Expedition. We rarely, if ever, go through a whole entire museum. The point for the students is to go to see the exhibit that is connected with the curriculum that they’re studying.

Trey: We go, not only to the museums. Some of others have been just community partnerships. You know, we go to Conasauga River, it’s an opportunity to work with the Forestry Service. And we go snorkeling at the river there, we learn about the diversity of the fishes. That’s a Learning Expedition that’s kind of birthed out of just the culture of what can we find in our community that connects to what we’re learning.

Drew: When we go on the Learning Expedition, we have people talk to us about our module, and they were informed ahead of time about our module, and then they can inform us on what we need to know and what we haven’t learned yet.

Maty: I really like going on the Learning Expeditions, and getting to interact with the actual things. Like when we were on The Trail of Tears, we got to walk and experience how it felt. When we got off the bus, we got a card with our Cherokee name and where we lived in Tennessee.

Jamie: They went and talked with a historian about the passage and learned about the Cherokee’s history and the decisions that were faced at that time.

Historian: So this is a space that can also tell us a lot about Chattanooga’s indigenous past. That tells us about the Cherokee.

Jamie: They actually went up to the walking bridge. One was the land route, one was the water route. When they finally got back to the school, they opened up their envelopes, and inside it there was a piece of paper that said if they survived or if they perished on the trail.

Maty: We realized how hard it must have been, and like really how hard the Cherokee had it, and how terrible it was to get forced off their lands.

Trey: The opportunities that we have to go outside of the classroom are absolutely rich. Giving the students all the same experience is where you begin to now have a discussion.

Jill: If you think about a student who’s learning English as a second language, or a student who’s lived in a high poverty situation, who may not have had lots of these kind of life experiences. All of a sudden, they’re going to museums every week. So their vocabularies expand, their understanding of the world expands in a very significant way. Over time, what we basically discovered is that the world is our classroom. And that if our students see learning taking place everywhere, they become life-long learners.

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Schools That Work

Normal Park Museum Magnet School