Enjoy your trip?

A recent BBC news article highlights the persistence of negative school experiences in the memories of adults. Recollections of bad experiences like being bullied or pranked tend to linger longer in our minds than much of what we learnt in the classroom, it suggests. It rang true with me. Things that seemed amusing to other children left emotional scars on me. Being deliberately tripped up in the corridor, falling flat on my face in front of several dozen laughing classmates, and then being asked 'did you enjoy your trip?' was humiliating.

Personally, I can also recall some of the bad teaching experiences quite vividly. It wasn't just the contact with certain overbearing teachers that had an effect on this diffident child. Looking back, I can also recall some of the poor pedagogy that we were subjected to. Whenever I see the Simpsons kids going on a school trip to the box factory, I remember the day trip we took to Wilton carpet factory when I was in Year 5 at Cherhill Primary School in Wiltshire. On reflection, I can't remember a thing we learnt about life, science or culture. All I remember was being shepherded around a huge hot factory full of noisy machines, whilst one of the employees assigned to be our guide droned on and on (inaudibly) about the manufacture of floor coverings. We were just glad to get outside into the clear air and away from the noise. All I learnt from the trip was that I never, ever wanted to work in a hot, noisy factory. This leads me to ask a question: Are school trips worth the effort and the expense? What exactly do these realia experiences actually help children to learn? More cynically, are school trips simply a way for teachers to 'take a day off' from teaching?

I'm being provocative of course, but let me answer my own question by recounting a school trip I enjoyed when I was living in Holland. It was 1973 and I was in my final year at AFCENT International School (now AFNORTH) in the South of Holland, and my entire year group went for a day trip to the futuristic, Philips Evoluon (pictured) in Eindhoven. At that time, the Philips 'Flying Saucer' was a science and technology museum and demonstration centre. Rumour had it that the Dutch electronics company had built it as a tax dodge, so it could lose money and then claim back on the loss. Instead, the Evoluon became a roaring success and people travelled from all over Europe to see it. Starting at the ground floor reception, we were all issued with a pair of headphones and a cassette tape player, on which a guide (in our own language) talked us around the exhibits. This was in itself quite a departure from the museums of the time, most of which simply handed you a leaflet to guide you around. We then proceeded to the glass lift (yes, it was totally transparent) which took us up to the top floor. Emerging, we explored the history of technology, from the cave dwelling art of Neolithic times, right up to the most recent, and proposed technological developments, as we progressed down, floor by floor.

Certain experiences from that day are still vivid in my memory. I saw videoconferencing for the first time, and used it to talk to my friends who were in a room just down the corridor. It was a crude representation of what would eventually be possible, and was simply a camera, TV and microphone connected to the other room, but it captured our imagination, and I remember thinking that this would one day be how we communicated with each other across the globe. Out imagination was fuelled even more when later that year we saw the first episodes of Star Trek, where people conversed with each other with full motion sound and vision. Whenever I see or use a video link today, my thoughts go back to that first experience in Holland.

Other exhibits also caught my attention. There was a demonstration where one of the staff bounced a rubber ball on the floor, and then immersed it into liquid nitrogen. Seconds later, he retrieved it and smashed it on the floor as though it was earthenware. I also remember watching a robot very slowly drilling holes in a piece of perspex that eventually became a graphic representation of the Evoluon.  I waited patiently for about 20 minutes until it had finished, and was then rewarded when it deposited the perspex in the receptacle. I took it home with me, and was offered tempting sums of money by some of my friends on the bus home to part with it. I still have that robot created piece of art in my possession to this day.

The entire experience at the Philips Flying Saucer changed me. I only spent a few hours there, but it is still massive in my mind, a lifetime later. I became interested in science and technology and began to collect books, models, artefacts, experiments - and I avidly read more and more about technology and the future. I really believe that that school trip was the catalyst that shaped me into who I am today. It is ironic that I failed all my science exams and left school later that year with very few academic qualifications. That didn't matter to me. What was most important for me was that I had the seed of ideas in my head, and a new found fascination for discovering new things. I now had a passion for science and technology, that became the drive for my later career as an academic working in technology and education. It's just a pity that kind of school trip didn't take place earlier in my school career.

You see, I made the link between the school trip, and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It excited and inspired me. For me, that is the power of the school trip. But it has to be meaningful to be effective. It has to have some sound pedagogy to underpin it. So dear teacher, the next time you plan a school trip for your students, make sure it is to somewhere exciting, relevant and potentially inspiring. No more carpet factories please!

Photos by Lee Morley and Stephane Gaudry


Enjoy your trip? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.