“Bear spray will be provided.” Those five words at the end of the syllabus for Geography 269 are just one of several indications that the summer course is not your average study abroad offering.
Though they don’t have to bring bear spray, the students in the course, “Geographic Field Studies in Western Canada,” are expected, for the most part, to cook their own meals, sleep in hostels, and be prepared for strenuous hikes.
Starting in Calgary, Alberta, they do field research in southern Alberta and British Columbia, taking in the prairies and the Canadian Rockies and spending time in small towns and stunning national parks, including Waterton Lakes and Banff.
“The landscape is the star of the course,” says Associate Professor of Geography David Robertson, who is from Calgary. He leads the trip, along with his geography colleague Associate Professor James Kernan. “I get an incredible amount of pleasure teaching my students about my hometown. It makes me feel simply proud.”
Last August the course was offered for the seventh time, and once again it proved to be an academically rigorous, physically demanding experience that immersed the students in the daily life of a stunning and diverse world they had not known.
“Millennials, and myself included, tend to look at the world at a broader perspective,” says Jimmy Feng ’18, a geography major from Brooklyn who knew little about Canada before taking the course. “But in doing so, we often ignore local surroundings. We seek to invoke change on a grand scale, but that will never be possible if we do not even know about our own backyard.”
Robertson is quick to stress that the culture and way of life in Western Canada is a distinct culture; that to study its communities is really and truly to study abroad, though the students didn’t have to cross an ocean to get there.
Their goal is to do what geographers do: explore how communities have been shaped by social and natural geography, and see how things came together, how they work, and how they might be made better.
And there’s another payoff. The students — there were 12 this past summer — and their teachers learn to work together, to teach each other, and to get along. (The syllabus says that anyone who is “willfully whiny” will lose participation points. It doesn’t happen often.)
Immersion and collaboration with classmates and professors made it “the best two weeks” of her life, says geography major Brianne Hart ’17. “The people on the trip made it special,” she says, “but it was also being immersed in a culture.”
Two weeks in the mountains also means trying new things.
“I learned how to be more independent and push myself out of my comfort zone, to interact with people I never would have known and go on strenuous day-long hikes I never thought I could accomplish,” says Cara O’Shea ’19, an accounting major. “Overall, this trip gave me a taste for travel and a yearning to go everywhere and continue to push myself.”
O’Shea and other students conducted research on a topic of their choosing. “They bring knowledge into the field,” Robertson says, “and they see how it’s exemplified.”
O’Shea’s course project was to study how the 1914 Hillcrest coal mining disaster in Alberta was remembered. One hundred eighty-nine workers lost their lives, she says, but the tragedy was overshadowed by the outbreak of World War I. The men were buried in a mass grave and it wasn’t until the year 2000 that a granite memorial to the workers was erected.
Hart’s project set out to answer the age-old question: How do the grizzlies, elk, deer and s