Review

In her work, Beyond the Field Trip, Uma Krishnaswami advocates making school field trips—to national, state, and local parks and wilderness sites especially—an integral and key part of a student-centered, interactive curriculum. As she notes in her introduction, school field trips are often used by teachers as isolated ends in and of themselves. They become occasions for a show-and-tell of facts about a site, rather than inquisitive, student-based studies of the many resources public sites offer. As a result, because facts conveyed about sites are never set within the contexts of student knowledge and inquiry, students never grasp them—and thus field trips remain nothing more than outside-the-classroom activities. The author proposes an alternative model for school field trips. In her model, the trip, planned in advance by the teacher and supported with preparatory work in the classroom beforehand, is an active, engaged learning experience where students set out to complete projects, while on-site, that encourage them to ask and answer questions on their own about the place they are visiting. The field trip thus becomes an enthusiastic and energized "process of inquiry" where students are engaged actively in discovering the site. This process, she argues, "instills" in them"a sense of ownership" about the place they visit [p. xiii]. In other words, through a process of active, rather than passive, engagement, students come to understand the site and make it meaningful in ways that are important to them. As she sees it, every place, whether a national park or a local historical site, "holds a story waiting to be shared" [p. xvi]. It is the teacher's obligation to devise methods whereby his/her students can uncover these stories.	1
Krishnaswami also proposes more specific plans for accomplishing these goals. Here she discusses in detail some specific activities or projects she or others have used in working with students while on site. She underscores several points repeatedly. First, she emphasizes the need to plan trips thoroughly. Teachers need to visit sites ahead of time, devising specific learning objectives for the trip based upon their own firsthand evaluation of the site and what it has to offer. Second, and related to planning, the teacher's role during the field trip should be mostly behind the scenes. The teacher acts as planner, coordinator, and facilitator on the day of the event. During the trip, the teacher's knowledge stays in the background; he or she should be seen to be participating alongside his or her students in the day's activities. Third, all trips must work towards the creation of a product that represents students' self-generated understandings of the site. Here she discusses ideas for mostly creative projects like writings or artwork that can be done while on-site. The products of these projects, she argues, allow students to tell stories about a place and its meaning by asking their own questions about a site. Finally, she advocates strongly that the products of the trip must be presented before an audience. Field trips must have some degree of accountability to make them meaningful learning experiences; an audience, she argues, encourages students to gear their work towards specific ends.	2
And where does history fit into her model? By Krishnaswami's reckoning, history also can and should be taught as a creative process, especially when it comes to interpreting the meaning of public places. Using an example of a group of Maryland students who traced one path of the underground railroad, she argues that going out and interacting with historic places can encourage students to feel the past in personal ways that better enable them to understand the implications of diversity. Focusing on the stories of the past, she believes, is the way to make history more interesting to students. Krishnaswami's work has important implications. Some of these implications, however, should already be familiar to most educators. At its most fundamental, Krishnaswami's book advocates the use of engaged, student-centered teaching techniques in settings outside the traditional classroom. Most teachers should be well accustomed to such calls for active learning. Less familiar to some might be her call to use public places as sites to ignite such dynamic learning. Furthermore, in an age where assessment is an issue at many educational institutions, her proposal that field trips include a product to be in some way presented to others fits nicely with the educational goals of an increasing number of teachers and schools. Here, she suggests, is another avenue through which teachers can demonstrate students' learning outcomes in concrete and meaningful ways.	3
Muhlenberg College Judith Ridner

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