A school bus full of excited children, all with name tags and carefully packed sack lunches. A teacher, away from the routine of the classroom. Several parents to help shepherd the students through the day. Songs and chatter to pass the travel time. Put them all together, point it toward a special destination, and, voila!, it’s a field trip.
That description would likely register with several generations of students, whether from the 1930s, 1960s or 1990s.
But what parents might recall from their own youthful field trips and what students today experience may be quite different. As cultural institutions reach out more and more to teachers and curriculum experts, they strive to make a field trip day (or night) a more purposeful and directed learning experience.
“The only thing that’s the same is the yellow bus,” said 5th-grade teacher Elaine Hummer, a veteran teacher of 28 years.
Hummer, who teaches at Madison Elementary School in Hinsdale, said the change is remarkable. “Museums used to be just sitting there, more like a library. They’d give us a date, permission to come and that was about the extent of it,” she said. “Now, rather than sitting there waiting for us to come through, they’re becoming partners with us. There’s just no comparison with what was offered when I started.”
As would be expected, Chicago’s major institutions draw hundreds of thousands of children every year. Last year marked a record at the Art Institute of Chicago, with nearly 141,500 students visiting in school groups. At Brookfield Zoo, the number of registered school visitors was more than 220,000. At the smaller Chicago Academy of Sciences near Lincoln Park Zoo, about 30,000 children arrived with their schools.
With the exposure to all those young minds, many institution directors are concerned with how their facilities deliver information. As a result, changes have been made in recent years in programs and displays-all aimed at enhancing the learning experience.
Greg Melaik, education specialist at Brookfield Zoo, explained: “In the early days, education was left largely up to the teacher’s abilities, or sometimes inabilities, when it came to visiting the zoo. But it became apparent (to zoo officials) that classes couldn’t just come here and learn by osmosis.”
Like other institutions, Brookfield Zoo turned to the community of educators. “To become relevant, we had to find out what it is (teachers) need. Frankly, some of the teachers didn’t view coming to the zoo as an educational opportunity, so it was a learning experience for both parties,” Melaik said. “We said, `We have these programs we’re thinking of developing. What do you think?’ “
As a result, Brookfield Zoo started its Connections program in 1986 with the help of teachers and administrators from a dozen area school districts. It consists of a three-part curriculum geared toward elementary school students.
There’s a classroom portion, a do-at-the-zoo portion and follow-up materials for back in the classroom. Students study things like animal adaptation to the seasons, endangered species, desert habitats and several others subjects. The units provide teacher guides, vocabulary and concept introduction, student activity books, letters to parents and a certificate of completion. In that way, the field trip lesson becomes almost an extension course for children.
Exhibits themselves have also been changed to meet additional learning styles. At the zoo’s new Habitat Africa, for instance, visitors not only read the traditional interpretive signs but they now get special things to sniff, examine the undigested material in owl pellets with a magnifying glass, feel tortoise shells, even look through the Giraffe’s-Eye View Scope, which offers a glimpse from a giraffe’s vantage point 16 feet above the ground.
Similar programs are being offered elsewhere, though not all field trip groups participate in the directed programs. (The curriculum-type approach is optional at area institutions, and some school groups choose to tour independently.)
At the Chicago Historical Society, Lynn McRainey, associate educator for school programs, agreed that the approach is meant to offer more opportunities for learning. “It’s not one style anymore that you go, look at objects and read labels,” McRainey said. “Teacher handbooks are made available before the visit. All of these provide background information for teachers. There are also student worksheets for the classroom and for the galleries here.”
Since 1989, the museum’s Voices program has featured actors and actresses playing the roles of famous Americans. Characters such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe are on hand for school groups most mornings.
“The key is to get children to look at history in new ways,” McRainey said. “Handbooks, interpreters and activity guides all help the students learn to read artifacts. It’s not so much that we want them knowing dates and names. We want them to learn how to interpret history.”
Additional training for teachers is now offered at most of the museums. Summer programs, educator workshops and even sleepover seminars are scheduled to give teachers insight into what the institutions have to offer. For instance, this winter, teachers may enroll in the Field Museum’s fourth annual Educator’s Overnight, which includes a classroom activity fair, exhibit explorations and performances. (“Pack your sleeping bag and toothbrush,” notes the museum’s program catalog.)
This push for new cooperation between the institutions and schools came from educators, according to Phil Parfitt, manager of education with the Chicago Academy of Sciences. “Teachers are asking for it,” he explained. “Textbooks have failed us. Teachers have found that it’s a more valuable experience to teach a topic like fire or ecosystems for four or five weeks by incorporating several curricular areas.”
Parfitt explained that now when museum educators present material, the thrust is on several levels: math, science, reading, writing and art, for example. “That kind of package has evolved over the past six years or so,” he said. “That’s the big thing, the real cooperative effort between the schools and institutions. The museum guides, the videos . . . all attempt to make this a real-life experience as compared to just what they would see in a textbook.”
Of course, going to Chicago is not necessary for a rewarding field trip experience. Opportunities abound in the suburbs as well. Many school groups take advantage of young people’s performances at local theaters. Schools also visit the area museums and other attractions.
Teachers make creative use of what’s available as well. One Elmhurst 5th-grade class studied economics by taking out a “loan” from a local bank and then “opened” a restaurant. The culminating field trip last spring took the youngsters to a nearby restaurant, where they ran the operation on a Sunday.
In Geneva, all 4th graders study the fragile prairie by going only as far as Fermilab’s prairie. Other Geneva students study nearby river quality through the Fox River Monitoring Project.
Perhaps the significance in all this is not where the field trip is headed but how the available resources are tapped. “The children should know what the objectives are. We’re (taking a field trip) for a purpose,” Hummer said.
“It isn’t just, `Okay, we’ve had our field trip; we’re done,’ ” she said. “They know what they must learn while we’re there.”
