2022 18 Day Sendoff!

Here’s a photo of their sendoff from Sunday – Brains trip left a day early – and Monday! Below are the class descriptions. Stay tuned for a future post to learn more about what these trips did on their 18 days.

Foundations of Creativity:

This field trip unit course will focus on the “who”s, “how”s, and “why”s of what it means to be creative. We will spend time looking at different creative careers and examine how and why people started to make art and why we have never stopped since. Some possible deeper dives are studying design, fine art, crafts and more. This course will be largely hands-on. Students will be making art almost daily and be building up their creative abilities over the classroom portion and on the road. This will happen through creative exercises, visual note taking, readings and discussions. During the making process students will be prompted to push themselves in different materials, subject matter and processes. This is to help students push past creative blocks and to build a foundation of a creative mindset for years to come.

Our Social Brains:

Brains? Brains! In this class, we will explore how the brain works and how it governs the way we make decisions, form relationships with others, communicate, and feel. We will delve into basic neuroscience and cognitive and social psychology and learn about various experiments and discoveries that have shaped these fields and our understanding of the human brain and mind. We’ll also talk about what it means to design a social experiment, and have the chance to design our own and potentially perform them during the field trip portion of the class. Other real-world applications will depend on student interest as we design this trip together, but could include looking at the social impact of drugs and other substances that alter our brain chemistry, and how access to mental health resources differs in various communities.

Waste:

This course will study waste as a physical and cultural phenomenon. Students will do lab work regarding quantitative, qualitative, and chemical analysis of their campus waste stream. They’ll study the materials and components that compose the bulk of waste in their culture, and the physical and chemical strategies employed to deal with them (or not deal with them) from preventative design to energy recovery. Students will read and report on topics of their interest around the environmental, physical, and industrial science of waste. We’ll try to do enough statistics to get a sense of the scale and trajectory of waste, and then we’ll get ready for our trip by building out a list of industrial sites, waste scientists and engineers, and locations of cultural interest that we’ll try to visit on the road. The trip will be defined by the students, but will likely include hands-on exposure to both the cutting edge and the dirtiest, broadest strokes of waste production and management in the country.