summer geography institute workshop: Sharing a passion for landscape through field trips, The

Social Studies Review, Spring 2003 by Fredrich, Barbara, Osborn, Alan Rice

...we are obligated to make a map of our own homeland, our own field or meadow. We carry engraved in our hearts the map of our world as we know it.

James Cowan (1966). A Mapmaker's Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice.

INTRODUCTION

Norm, a burly retired Navy man, now a trolley driver, shows us the smallest state park in California. Anna, a museum decent, allows us to touch Asian sculptures and recline like a Buddha. Emily and Stephanie send us on an errand: find examples of movement and human-environment interactions in Old Town. Barbara leads us to art museums to learn how to identify cloud types in landscape paintings. Alan illustrates with a few mouse clicks the almost infinite variety of maps we can produce for the classroom. Kate teaches us how to do the limbo and in that process learn about declining water supplies in Mediterranean regions including San Diego. At a xeriscape garden we touch and smell drought-adapted plants from around the world. We sink our fingers into different soil types contained in concrete barrels. We feel temperature differences in distinct ground covers and learn that choosing the right kind of lawn may save thousands of gallons of water and hundreds of dollars.

Most human interaction incorporates one or more of the five themes of geography: location, place, movement, human-environment interactions, and regions. We believe geographic themes that excite and intellectually stimulate teacher-participants during their professional development are more likely to be incorporated into the K-12 curriculum. Our objective is to accomplish that process precisely with those teachers whose backgrounds in geography are fairly limited. They experience all this during the course of five days of fun-filled but intensive workshops and field excursions sponsored by the California Geographic Alliance (www.humboldt.edu/cga).

In this essay we provide snippets of excursions or geographic journeys from two very different field trips. We illustrate geographic processes, and summarize personal insights from the perspective of two instructors. We hope to stimulate the reader to consider such activities and thus better position geographic literacy and geographic education in K-12 curriculum. Although our two sample field trips highlight San Diego, the methods and underlying geographic themes can be replicated in any location.

THE FIELD TRIPS

Field Trip #1: Art and Geography

Experienced teachers know that pre-field trip preparation is the hallmark of a successful experience. Our first field trip links geography with art, a process that requires repeat visits to art museums as well as extensive homework. A good map that tells participants where to go and what they should expect to see is essential to a successful trip. Not every museum has them, and if they exist they might not be very useful; museum directors, when presenting new exhibits, frequently rotate movable walls to direct visitors. The solution is to produce a simple map, in one case using the only template we could find-a museum evacuation chart that was behind glass on a wall obscured by a large pillar. In the end, the maps we produced list and locate thirty-seven American landscape paintings at the San Diego Museum of Art, and seventeen paintings at the nearby Timken Gallery.

Why take the time? Why make our maps? Experience shows that a significant frustration is reduced if the people and items to be viewed are clearly identified prior to the visit. Furthermore, we can direct the participants' attention to a preset order. In many cases, the first items a person sees on a field trip have the greatest impact, thus we key our map to the most important sites. There is also the issue of attention span. After an hour many visitors (of any age group) are visually saturated, bleary-eyed and even bored. Artists and geographers alike recommend being selective. Finally, flexibility with respect to the actual amount of time allocated is important because it accommodates the unanticipated events that occur more often than not. Thus prepared maps enable us to complete the exercise in about an hour and a half.

While congregating in the lobby, we briefly review some of the basic connections between geography and art: the portrayal of space and spatial relationships, what landscapes include (what you see with your eyes), historic settings such as old maps and important battle scenes, and the individual contributions of artists in terms of perception and interpretation. Landscape art is a visual narration of ideas transferred from the mind of the artist to the canvas. A roster of topics and specific questions to be considered accompany each participant. The responses require careful observation of the selected paintings and following with generalizations about the regional or local perspective of the artist. In our initial design for the field trip we emphasize three concepts:

1) Maps showing places where the artist lived, worked or visited, or possibly galleries which display the artist's works, as represented in the collection. Here we built upon "Linking Geography and Art: Inness' "The Lackawanna Valley" (Fredrich, 1996).