Fieldwork Practicum in Rockbridge County Schools

Fieldwork in Expeditionary Learning and Teaching is a community-based course focused on civic engagement in schools, giving VMI cadets opportunities to apply learning outside the classroom, and develop new rhetorical skills while working with experts and community members to explore local needs and concerns. In Spring of 2020, VMI students enjoyed participating in Rockbridge County classrooms for their Fieldwork experience.  To synthesize their learning in the course, students both observed, investigated and designed learning inquiries with local K-12 students as part of Rockbridge County’s Project-Based Learning Initiative.  

Our course is grounded in 10 principles of Outward Bound’s Expeditionary Learning (EL Ed, see below), such as the primacy of self discovery, collaboration and competition, and service, as well as 7 ‘Gold Standard’ elements for Project-based learning, originating with John Dewey’s experiential philosophies (PBL Website). In turn, our community fieldwork partnerships will practice the following principles: 

                                 

These combined EL and PBL elements shaped best practices for our learning inquiries with local students, but also with our peers in the VMI classroom, allowing us to reassess how learning is, as Dewey claimed, ‘a moving force’ both continuous and interactive, both individual and social, that requires us to share and develop our academic, personal and civic habits and commitments. To that end, our aims are to

• build a strong connection to the world
• develop high standards for learning
• assess and understand what we’ve learned via reflection
• foster an ethics of practice and service
• connect with teachers’ passion for learning and alertness to opportunity
• support students responsibility for their own learning
• create a spirit of adventure and challenge
• make room for in-depth study, fieldwork, interdisciplinary connections
• enable teacher and student leadership, teamwork, organization
• generate new roles for learners—collaborator, apprentice, explorer, expert

Adapted from Key Expeditionary Learning Design Principles, Guide for Planning a Learning Expedition (Outward Bound, 1998)