Integrated International Field Trips Maximize Accessibility and Preserve Learning Value in an Age of Uncertainty

Abstract

The benefits of study abroad have been well documented. Students who have international learning experiences, regardless of program duration, return with improved knowledge across cognitive dimensions (Cisneros-Donahue et al. 2012), more intercultural competence (Paras et al. 2019), better creative-thinking skills (Lee, Therriault, and Linderholm 2012), increased confidence, and clarified career goals (Bretag and van der Veen 2017). The inclusion of engaging learning activities, such as service learning (Moak 2020; Paras et al. 2019) or outdoor adventure education (Asfeldt and Takano 2020), results in additional benefits for students’ experiences and learning outcomes. Although students who wish to study abroad generally seek an impactful experience and feel a desire to explore a new part of the world, they must also make practical considerations. The cost of studying abroad, at-home time commitments (e.g., work or family obligations), and space in a student’s curriculum are factors that may limit the accessibility of such opportunities for many students (Bretag and van der Veen 2017; Smith and Mitry 2008). The decision to study abroad is ultimately dependent on a student’s assessment of the risk associated with doing so, in terms of not only the physical risk but also the investment since the outcome is unknown at the time of decision-making (Relyea, Cocchiara, and Studdard 2008). For faculty and administrators involved in organizing and offering faculty-led international learning opportunities, the core challenge is to design programs that offer meaningful educational experiences. Additionally, they must make them broadly accessible for students with financial, time, and/or programmatic constraints, and market and recruit effectively to make them cost-effective for the institution. Moreover, instability across the world (e.g., political unrest, natural disasters, and pandemics) is a reality that faculty and administrators face when contemplating how, or even whether, to offer international learning opportunities, and that students and parents consider when weighing the pros and cons of studying abroad. This paper presents a spring break international field trip to the Philippines that was organized as an optional one-credit lab course to be taken in conjunction with a full-semester three-credit geography course examining the relationship between forests and society. The accompanying semester-long course was an upper-level experiential learning course that covered the breadth of geographic perspectives on the topic—from human, physical, and human–environment traditions in the discipline—and reviewed common research methods including social surveys and forest stand assessments. The field trip was to be hosted by the Institute of Tropical Ecology and Environmental Management at Visayas State University and offer an in-depth, hands-on learning experience on tropical forest ecology, but it was unfortunately canceled one week prior to departure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The arguments presented herein are based on student essays reflecting on their experiences applying and preparing for the trip and its eventual cancelation, and the faculty members’ experiences with program design, recruitment, preparation, and cancelation. This paper highlights how integrated international field trips can be more accessible and are able to preserve learning value in the face of global instability. It specifically discusses how integrated international field trips (1) can benefit from targeted recruitment; (2) can lower the cost of international learning opportunities, in terms of both travel and tuition; (3) have timing benefits, including easing the time burden placed on students interested in participating and being more accessible to upper-level students; (4) have added benefits of being associated with semester-long courses, such as establishing foundational and introductory knowledge before departure, identifying specific opportunities for geographers to engage in interdisciplinary research with another field, and establishing relationships with peers and faculty; and (5) remove the “all-or-nothing” aspect of learning outcomes associated with stand-alone international learning opportunities in the face of global uncertainty.