The BGSU contingent of (from left to right) students Melanie Smith and Julie Altiere, instructor Barbara Childers, and students Danielle Croy and Andrea Scott prepare to board the bus on their journey across Minnesota and South Dakota as part of the eighth-grade field investigations trip.

Western trip gives BGSU education majors insight into adolescents

“The classroom is the world outside,” according to Barbara Childers, educational psychology.

Childers put her philosophy into action in May, when she took four education majors on a weeklong “field trip” to Minnesota and South Dakota, where they worked with 48 students of Parkers Prairie, Minn., eighth-grade science teacher Marlene Schoeneck and several geology students from the University of Minnesota, Morris.

The eighth-grade field investigations trip was a collaboration between the BGSU students; Childers; UMM, and Schoeneck, a BGSU alumna and Childers’ high school classmate.

“It was the adventure of a lifetime,” said Childers. “Every future educator should have such an experience.”

For BGSU students Andrea Scott, Danielle Croy, Julie Altiere and Melanie Smith, the trip was a chance to see the theories they have studied in their educational psychology class come alive and to use them as tools in dealing with real eighth-graders. Theorists’ names such as Piaget, Maslow, Skinner and Bandura suddenly became very important when the students had to analyze and respond to the situations that developed when adolescents were living and learning together day and night, especially when problem behaviors arose, Childers said.

“The evolution of the social dynamics of the group over the week was a condensation of what you’d see in a classroom over a three-month period,” Childers said, adding that it was not the situations themselves but how they were resolved that provided the learning experience for the BGSU students.

They also saw Childers and Schoeneck model the teaching and social-management strategies they will need later in their own classrooms.

While visiting Badlands National Park and other sites in Minnesota and South Dakota, the eighth-graders learned about a range of topics including geology, ecology, Native American carving traditions and wind-generated electric power. The experience was designed to further their sense of curiosity about the world and encourage their love of learning through inquiry.

Scott, from Centerburg; Croy, from Ottawa; Altiere, from Parma, and Smith, from Maumee, were able to apply fundamental theories in an educational setting and practice teaching strategies, particularly inquiry-based education.

“Marlene was an excellent role model in this,” Croy said. “She would continually come up with more leading questions to get them to think about what they were observing.”

Schoeneck said that the quality of the eighth-graders’ journal entries following purely inquiry-based experiences versus the more “teacher-led” experiences gave evidence that students learn best outside the traditional classroom, when they are in charge of their own knowledge acquisition. “It makes you think about activities you plan for the classroom—if they’re not inquiry-based, you can see the students won’t get as much from them,” she said.

Living day to day with the younger students provided immediate feedback on what worked and what didn’t in their teaching, as well as a close-up look at the social interactions among children and their teachers that can impact learning.

“I would just be listening to the kids talk or watching what they were doing,” said Croy of her time with the students. “The theories were all there. You just have to know what you’re looking for.”

The BGSU students practiced building relationships with the eighth-graders so the students felt safe with them, and established the social foundation without which learning cannot reach its full potential, Childers said.

In one example, when they encountered a behavior problem early in the trip, they applied Albert Bandura’s theory known as the reciprocal determinism model—which posits that a person’s world, behavior and cognition, or perspective, are all interdependent. The BGSU students changed the “environmental” portion of the equation to effect a positive change in the behavior and cognition of the students involved.

Nightly discussions provided a forum to reflect on and review the day’s experiences.

“It’s so much different from student teaching or observing in a classroom,” Croy said. “You learn much more about yourself—how to teach, how to interact. It’s a lot of life lessons.”

Childers said she feels this type of experience, even before education majors begin their student-teaching, provides an invaluable benefit to their learning and understanding, better enabling them to apply what they learn in the college classroom to real life.

She said she found the desolate South Dakota landscape akin to the mundane routine often encountered in the educational world.

“Variety is just as important in education as it is in landscape,” she said. “Without it, you can lose your bearings and sight
of your goal.”

Students explore the unique landscape of the Badlands in South Dakota.