The school committee will consider the approval of field trips requiring out-of-state travel this month (field trips within the state, unless they involve overnight stays, do not require school committee approval). These initial requests are primarily from the music department of the high school, but over time we’ve seen various requests and, just last year, the school committee approved a joint foreign language and science field trip request for high school students to travel to Costa Rica. As we progress through this year, I anticipate that we’ll see some additional requests for out-of-state student travel.
In some school districts around the country, student field trips have been severely curtailed, or even eliminated (with the exception of ‘virtual’ field trips where students electronically travel without ever leaving their school buildings). The reasoning behind this change varies but often revolves around time on learning (i.e., if you’re not in school you can’t be learning the essential units of curriculum), the legalities of travel with minors for whom the school district becomes responsible, the difficulty of traveling with students with any kind of challenge (physical, social, emotional, etc.), the ever-increasing cost of travel (and the challenge of making that travel equitable for all students), and even the difficulty of finding staff volunteers to arrange and chaperone the trips. I cannot discount any of these, or the myriad other reasons, schools have for curtailing field trips as they are certainly concerns that Gateway faces when considering and approving field trips.
I believe that field trip benefits far outweigh the costs (including financial, time in school, staff challenges, and ensuring that all of the various and sundry details are accounted for in the planning for any specific field trip). These benefits are plentiful yet hard to quantify which may, under the auspices of accountability by testing, be yet another reason some schools have cut back on trips. After all, it appears that in today’s educational environment, if learning cannot be measured by some sort of statistical, easily defined assessment such as MCAS, then it can’t be that important or significant. Thus, important measures of student growth and success related to being successful in life—such as independence, problem solving, communication, determination, and cultural proficiency—along with school subjects such as art, music, physical education, foreign language, and even history, are all relegated to second class citizenship due to not having a simple means to test any growth in student proficiency. Yet these 21st Century skills, and the breadth of ‘living’ skills in those untested subject areas, are what make people effective at living, working, and participating in a democratic society.
The inability to easily measure student growth in the many aspects that make up the ‘whole’ child shouldn’t stop us from providing those opportunities to our students. We’ve all heard, and most likely experienced, the reality that we learn best by doing, and learn more from failures and mistakes than from easy successes, and that we learn more when we’re reaching beyond our comfort level, all of which are often incorporated into the learning that occurs during field trips. The reality is that no virtual field trip can replicate the experiences of actual travel – of experiencing first-hand turtles nesting in Costa Rica, of having to determine the best way to move around Disney World, of determining how to split up the cost of a shared dinner (not to mention the gratuity), of meeting people from other cultures who speak a native language other than English, and of learning to be comfortable living with someone other than your family, even if only for a few days. For those going onto college, into the military, or even just moving out on their own, these experiences are of incalculable worth despite never being tested on a multiple choice or short answer test.
