From the MFA and Back Bay to the Las Vegas Desert

Field Trips Enliven Extension School Courses

Fred Lyford, the owner of Puritan Press, Inc., Hollis, New Hampshire, describes the printing process to Nora Cameronšs students.

The Isaac Royall House in Medford, the beaches of Cape Cod, the Globe Theatre in London, and the desert outside Las Vegas: these locations don't readily come to mind as settings for Extension School courses, but in fact they are. Several Extension School instructors have successfully incorporated daytime field trips into their evening classes, despite the challenges of scheduling excursions for working adults whose free time is at a premium. The trips range from day trips to local museums like the Boott Cotton Mills in Lowell's National Historical Park (History of American Capitalism) and the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester (Medieval Warfare and the Crusades) to ten-day tours of London that focus on the lives and works of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (The Makers of Modern Poetry).

The Architecture of Boston, taught by Alexander von Hoffman, Lecturer on Urban Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design, includes field trips to the Royall House mentioned above, the Harrison Gray Otis House on Beacon Hill, the Gropius House in Lincoln, and a walking tour of the Back Bay. According to von Hoffman, these visits to architectural projects "convey their three-dimensional essences in ways that two-dimensional slide projections, photographs, and architectural plans cannot. A field trip allows students to move through Boston to see how different buildings, parks, streets, and other elements together compose the fabric of the city." In addition, he notes that the tour guides have intimate knowledge of the buildings and can provide the kind of details that would not ordinarily be covered by lectures that survey many buildings at once. "In an ideal world," von Hoffman pointed out, "at least half of The Architecture of Boston classes would be field trips. But in that same ideal world, all Extension School students would be free from working during the day to attend them."

John Southard, Professor of Geology, Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the instructor of many Extension School geology courses (The History of the Earth and The Geology of New England, among others), concurred. "Courses in earth science are best, or most naturally, taught in solid blocks of time, during which lectures and field trips are interspersed. Seldom is that possible, and I have to content myself with one or two field-trip days during the semester." Southard cited New England weather as a major problem for his courses: "It is difficult, often unpleasant, and sometimes impossible to look at rocks and environments in the depth of winter." Expense is another, and the instructor tries to "scout out the trip beforehand to make reservations at economical, but not too sleazy, motels." In 1990, Southard taught Geology in the Field, which included a more ambitious trip. After a few weeks of preparatory lectures, the class flew to Las Vegas, camped in the desert, and did intensive fieldwork for one week. Southard reports that after the class ended, several of the participants organized a local amateur geological society named the "Boston Bay Group" (a play on the name of the rock unit that underlies much of the Boston area). Thirteen years later, the group continues to meet once a month to hear guest speakers who lecture on geological topics.

Field trips are an integral part of Environmental Management I and II and Ocean Environments, said instructor George Buckley, Director of the Philippe Cousteau Foundation and Coordinator of Science, Watertown Public Schools. Group trips to Cape Cod to study coastal ecosystem management and independent visits to the New England Aquarium allow students to see actual habitats, organisms, and facilities that are discussed in class and the textbooks. Buckley explained that holding a live horseshoe crab ("Will it hurt me?" "Will I hurt it?") and viewing its medically valuable bright blue blood are very different from reading about them. Mindful of the fact that Extension students do not live in an "ideal world," the instructors and teaching assistants in the environmental management courses are working on developing a virtual field trip, where students film and edit visual images of the trips for future use both on campus and online.

For students in Nora Cameron's Desktop Publishing, a Saturday field trip to a commercial printer provides a hands-on lesson on how a publication is printed. Cameron, Associate Director of Promotions and Publications, Division of Continuing Education, explained: "Since the course is designed for students who wish to enter the field of graphic design, it is very important that they not only know how to successfully design a publication, but also how to produce that publication as well." On the field trip to the printer, students visit the prepress department, watch presses at work, and see what is involved in the bindery. According to the instructor, "Students tell me that what they have learned during the semester becomes 'real' after the field trip and gives them the practical knowledge and confidence they need to begin a design career."

An annual feature of Dr. Mary Crawford-Volk's Inventing the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is a field trip to the museum itself. Entering the museum from its original entry, students experience the grandeur of the magnificent stairway lined with columns and marble statues that the original architects designed. Students visit special exhibitions, meet with curators and staff members, and experience other aspects of the building and collections. This fall Chad Reilly, an associate architect at CBT, the Boston firm working with Foster Partners on a new master plan of the museum, presented blueprints and renderings and referred to onsite models for the planned renovations and expansion of the MFA. Being in the building, students saw how the architecture--and curatorial possibilities--will be changing. With Reilly and Crawford-Volk there to provide answers, students asked questions they would not have considered when sitting in a classroom.

This spring's trip to England represents the third English tour, "in the company of the instructor," offered by Sue Weaver Schopf, Assistant Dean of University Extension, in conjunction with her literature courses. Two years ago, 70 students in Schopf's Masterworks of Western Drama traveled to London over spring break, attending plays daily--sometimes twice a day. The instructor arranged private backstage tours at the Globe Theatre and the National Theatre, where they visited the scenery-and-costume design shops and learned how the sets and lighting were controlled during a performance. At the Covent Garden's Theatre Museum, they received a lesson in theatrical makeup techniques and the research that goes into period costumes. The next year, in conjunction with Major British Authors in the British Tradition: Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, 45 students visited sites directly connected with each of the major texts, including a day trip to Canterbury Cathedral to walk in the footsteps of Chaucer's pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. "Perhaps the high point of that trip," according to Schopf, "was a recreation of the walk taken by the main character in Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway, which began at 10 am at Westminster Abbey, just as Big Ben was chiming. As we followed in Clarissa Dalloway's footsteps through St. James Park to the Mall, the Queen's Horse Guards came riding up on their beautiful black horses and everyone stopped to watch. It was as if the whole spectacle had been planned just for us."

Like other instructors who tackle the logistical problems involved in planning field trips for busy Extension School students, Schopf argues that the effort is more than worth it. "Why do I do these tours? Because walking in the footsteps of the writers and seeing the landscapes that were important to them bring the literature to life as nothing else can. We can learn a great deal about how writers internalize the world around them, then re-imagine and recreate it in language. I don't want great writers to be little more than iconic figures in an anthology to my students; I want them to come fully to life--as men and women who once lived and worked in a place, absorbed its rhythms and its sights, and used that experience to make art."