The Art of Seeing—Student Engagement and Teaching in the Field

by Heather Butler -- 

I teach a 4-credit Dendrology course at Virginia Western Community College, which includes a 3-credit lecture and 1-credit lab. The lecture takes place in a traditional college classroom and covers tree physiology and forest ecology. The lab, however, is field-based and entails weekly field trips to forested areas where students learn to identify the common and Latin names of 100+ trees and shrubs native to the central Appalachia. I based the class on Virginia Tech’s field Dendrology lab developed by Dr. John Seiler. He still teaches at VT and was my instructor when I studied forestry. Each week, students learn to identify and properly name 8-10 new species, which are then added to a growing list of potential items on lab quizzes. Weekly quizzes are given at the beginning of each field lab, and the species add up quickly. If students aren’t engaged and practicing from the beginning, they can easily get overwhelmed, making it difficult to catch up!

What happened during my first semester teaching this lab?

I quickly learned two lessons: 

• Most of my students were unaccustomed to field trips, particularly in outdoor environments, and 
• Capping the class at 24—which is larger than VT’s class size—made it challenging to teach in a field setting. 

Although several students engaged in the tree identification discussions, the remaining students were distracted by social interactions, phones, and the problem of not being able to get near enough to see the small buds, leaves, flowers, and fruits. The next semester had a smaller, more manageable class size, but still, many students had not experienced learning in a field setting, and they did not seem to have the necessary focus and/or motivation to learn from my demonstrations. 

After two semesters of teaching and working out other issues, I decided to tackle student engagement and management of the field trips. I wanted to actively coordinate the class and to be more proactive in engaging the students. This involved incorporating three techniques: 

• Divide the class into smaller groups that rotate with me for species demonstrations
• Have the free group practice finding species in the vicinity while I actively work the other group
• End the field session with a scavenger hunt where pairs of students must find one of the species we learned that day and show me how they knew its identity. 

What happened my third semester teaching this lab?

On the first day, I let students know about the difficulty with seeing and that I would present the material twice. I’m not one to micromanage, so as we got to each tree, I started teaching the features to whoever crowded around. When I finished, I asked the second group to come forward. I suggested that the first group try to find other specimens of that tree in the vicinity and practice identifying other species nearby while I talked with the second group. The first couple of weeks were a little tough to get the less motivated students to work on their own, especially if they didn’t know their trees yet. As the weeks went on, they got into the routine and became better at staying on task. To my surprise, I also found that I was less stressed and enjoyed working with the smaller groups, and I did a better job of highlighting the details of the trees and explaining the Latin names. As we walked the trail from one species to the next, we incorporated more tree practice. Over time, the students were able to see the patterns in forest communities—more quickly than previous classes. 

The scavenger hunt at the end of the lab was a great success, too. Unfortunately, some weeks we ran out of time. Next semester, I might try to incorporate the scavenger hunt into the initial demo when pressed for time. For the most part, having students pair up to find one of the day’s new species was very effective. After this third round of teaching Dendrology, I’ve learned one of the biggest breakthroughs for students is when they develop “the art of seeing,” as one of our Biology instructors likes to call it. When students can train their eyes to focus on the immediate world around them, as opposed to checking phones and chatting with classmates, a whole new world opens up to them. 

To sum up this experience...

 While dendrology is not a commonly taught course, these teaching techniques are applicable to any agricultural or natural resources class where students go on field trips and need to focus on the environment around them. In writing this post, I did a little background research on the pedagogy of field trips in education and found there are five key outcomes, regardless of the student age and course content: 

1. 
   Provide real-world, first-hand experience
2. Develop observation and perception skills 
3. Add relevance and meaning to learning
4. Develop social and personal skills
5. Enhance intrinsic motivation and interest in the subject (Behrendt & Franklin, 2014). 

Agriculture and natural resource field classes clearly promote these outcomes, and I use them to develop field labs not only for Dendrology but also other field classes. 

If anyone would like to share their field teaching strategies, discuss the techniques described in this post, or learn more about the class, please contact me at hbutler@virginiawestern.edu. I welcome the opportunity to share experiences with colleagues and prospective students.  

References:

Behrendt, M., & Franklin, T. (2014). A review of research on school field trips and their value in education. International Journal of Environmental and Science Education, 9, 235-245. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1031445