Even in our digital world, there are still outsized returns to engaging with our physical one. Seeing things in person—whether observing in the natural world, studying at a museum, or witnessing an unfolding event—is a powerful way we learn, remember, and become. Weekly fieldwork in our middle school program is an important way that we extend what we are learning into the real world and invite the real world into our learning: the real world is at once a font of inspiration, a fact check on secondary sources, and a site of study. The skills students learn as part of fieldwork are skills that are genuinely useful in life: navigating the city by bus, train, and foot; hypothesizing, observing and investigating artifacts and phenomena; note-taking, synthesizing, and communicating—including with adults they haven’t met before. As a result, Rock Creek students don’t just learn about the world, they learn how to be in and engage with it!

The takeaway from a field trip to the Library of Congress is “We’ve been to the Library of Congress!” Field trips lack structure. Fieldwork, on the other hand, guides students so that their takeaways are more meaningful. Fieldwork is embedded into the chronology of a course. Before leaving campus, students do work in class to build their background knowledge and form questions about the topic. Then, in-person, students collect data, observe, and form further questions. Back at school, students discuss, debrief, and build on what they learned in their fieldwork. Instead of a generic field trip to the Library of Congress, fieldwork at the Library of Congress during the 7th grade world history unit on The Reformation might be a close observation of the Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed on a movable type printing press in the western world. The lasting takeaway from such fieldwork is a deeper understanding of how we got to the world we live in today.

Fieldwork operates on several levels to make learning stick. First, it is a form of autobiographical memory, which is privileged. Memory also favors meaning, novelty, emotions, and multi-sensory experiences, all of which fieldwork naturally incorporates. We remember what has meaning to us–and fieldwork offers the opportunity to create more meaning. Our minds also favor novelty, which fieldwork naturally provides by virtue of leaving the building. Multisensory experiences–ones that incorporate more than one of our senses such as vision and hearing or vision and touch–are also more memorable to us, and fieldwork integrates these. Finally, fieldwork can also spark curiosity, which leads to greater motivation to learn more.

In social sciences, fieldwork brings our curriculum to life. For example, as 5th grade students in Citizenship: Local & National learn about the wards of DC, they visit sites in each ward–from the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens to the Frederick Douglass house. As they learn about the structure of government, they make visits to each branch–executive, legislative, and judicial–to witness them firsthand. And as they learn about how rights were established and expanded in the U.S., they visit relevant exhibitions, from the National Museum of American History and Culture’s American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith exhibit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Making a Way out of No Way exhibit. 

In science, fieldwork creates a springboard for studying the natural world in 5th and 6th grade. In a unit on plants, students will conduct surveys for trees, biodiversity, and invasive species. In a unit on animals, students will visit the Jewels of Appalachia exhibit at the National Zoo’s Reptile house to understand how salamanders are critical to an entire nearby ecosystem, visit the Pollinator exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History to understand the keystone role pollinators play, and students will go on a nature walk at Rock Creek Park, using Merlin to identify birds. In their unit on ecosystems, students will visit two distinct ecosystems in the DC-area–a forest and a wetland–comparing & contrasting them. As a result of this program, Rock Creek students will get outside in meaningful ways, have opportunities to become interested in science, and extend their classroom learning into the real-world and vice versa.

Together, fieldwork and data science add qualitative and quantitative depth to our science and social science courses. Fieldwork generates curiosity and excitement about the subjects and helps make it stick; data science allows students to approach the subjects from an inquisitive and empirical perspective. Our science and social sciences programs are excellent on their own, but by incorporating fieldwork and data science, we are setting a new, engaging and intellectually ambitious standard.

At the Rock Creek School, our mission is to equip students to actively pursue the joy of learning, keenly observe the world around them, and thoughtfully contribute to the common good. Fieldwork contributes to all three prongs of our mission. In doing so, it develops students’ agency. Agency is the ability to choose a course of action and pursue it. Fieldwork builds the habit of getting out & about, seeing and doing things, and investigating what interests you. Rock Creek students don’t just learn about the world, they learn how to be active participants/scholars/citizens in it.