Field Trip Earth
About this resource
- Appropriate grades
- 3–12
- Subjects
- science (biology and life science, environmental science)
Legal
This catalog record is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. This license applies to the content of this page only and does not apply to the referenced website.
Field Trip Earth focuses on field-based wildlife conservation research projects ongoing around the world. Some of the projects are "live," and others are archived so readers may continue to access the relevant articles, photos, videos, and other materials. Students and other users can interact meaningfully with wildlife researchers and other conservation experts as they read researchers' field diary entries, direct questions to the researchers (and read their responses), listen to recorded satellite telephone calls and other communications, see video taken in the field, and discuss conservation issues with them.
Educator's guide
Field Trip Earth brings to classrooms an understanding of how wildlife research really happens. It illustrates the wild experience that field-based conservation researchers participate in every day. The site's goal is to provide students and teachers with the most authentic view of that experience, and of the work that these men and women do.
That view might come through reading the field journal entry of an elephant tracking team after it encounters the remains of a poached elephant in a Cameroonian savannah. Or, it could evolve by watching a series of videoclips that show black bear researchers taking morphological measurements — paw circumference, muzzle length, and so on — on an anesthetized female. And, in many cases, it would come only after bringing together a wide variety of information. To learn the story of how conservation scientists brought the red wolf back from the brink of extinction, for example, students must understand not only the wolf itself, but its habitat and how zoos all over the United States became part of that recovery effort.
What's important here is that the majority of the learning materials found on Field Trip Earth — the diaries, the videoclips, the datasets — are developed in the wild by the field researchers themselves. Nothing is staged: successes and failures alike are reported, photos and videos are sometimes shot on the run, and animals are poached or die of natural causes. What the website brings to classrooms, then, is a sense of that all-important "wild experience" — what really happens when a research team sets foot in Africa, Sri Lanka, or a wildlife refuge in North Carolina.
In turn, access to each field trip shows students that they too can learn by invoking the same important intellectual skills utilized by the researchers — observation, data manipulation, even basic reading and writing. Students also learn that wildlife conservation requires more than a scientific background; the researchers featured on Field Trip Earth also rely on their knowledge of literature, history, local cultures, government, art, sometimes even dance and drama, in order to fully understand the world they are working in. They have determined that conservation research is an excellent example of real-world, multi-disciplinary learning, and that's why Field Trip Earth uses it as the vehicle for teaching children (and supporting teachers) in all academic areas and at all grade levels.
We all know that children can be motivated to learn by including animals as part of the teaching process. What Field Trip Earth has learned is that student interest extends beyond the animals and reaches to the researchers themselves. The question most frequently asked by visitors to our website is “How do I get a job like yours?” Even the youngest students are clearly excited about participating, however vicariously, in conservation research projects.
For more information, contact Mark MacAllister, FTE Project Coordinator, at webmaster@fieldtripearth.org
