We Aren’t Too Old for Field Trips

I thought my field trip days ended a decade ago with elementary school visits to one-room prairie school houses and hometown museums.

But after two of my first-year courses at Harvard offered out-of-the classroom experiences, I realized I was mistaken.

In Humanities 10: “A Humanities Colloquium” I toured a printing press workshop at Houghton Library and attended a reading of The Odyssey; in my first year seminar, we took a class trip to check out the mummies at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

Every one of these experiences was good, for multiple reasons: We learned something new, from someone new. We got to know each other better, as a class. And we had fun doing it.

Field trips like these should occur in more Harvard courses.

While lectures and texts are great, field trips extend concepts learned in the classroom to lived experiences that deepen both understanding and interest. During our four undergraduate years — when we all contemplate our future professions — field trips also provide opportunities to see different careers in action.

Although field trip logistics can be difficult, Harvard’s location and resources make it particularly suited for educational outings.

Environmental Studies concentrators could visit the Harvard Forest in western Massachusetts. Economics students could take a tour of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. History concentrators could travel down to Plymouth to learn about English arrivals in the early 17th century. Computer science concentrators could meet with staff at Bullhorn or any other Boston-based software developer.

Further, public transportation like the MBTA makes downtown Boston — and its many museums and resources — quite accessible to students.

Additionally, some students and faculty criticize technology overuse in the classroom, while acknowledging that it is difficult to ban laptops and other electronic devices in lectures.

Field trips tackle this problem, providing hands-on, real-life opportunities for students to learn, without requiring screen time and technology use.

It’s not only students like me who are asking for more field trips. James Hanken, a biology professor and Director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, has similarly advocated for field trips at Harvard, stating that they create shared experiences promoting deeper engagement.

At a moment when Harvard is denounced as “out of touch” with everyday concerns and activities, field trips provide immediate, real-world experiences for students.

They connect students with the larger Cambridge, Boston, and Massachusetts communities, pushing them to interact with local residents and combatting our University’s tendency to isolate within the “ivory tower” of the academy.

Assignments structured around field trips can also have direct and real world connections to local communities that papers and p-sets don’t achieve. Local collaborations counter the elitism for which Harvard is currently being criticized.

If Harvard is truly committed to building the leaders of tomorrow, experiential learning — like the kind that occurs on field trips — needs to be a requirement within the Harvard curriculum.

Elizabeth R. Place ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a joint concentrator in Slavic Studies and English in Quincy House.