First fieldtrip - EOTC Education outside the classroom...

 Looking forward this weekend to take my first fieldtrip with my Semester A class to the MIT campus in Manukau to view the "Auckland Stories - Taku Tamaki" exhibition which has a range of neat exhibits and also traces the history of the city of Manukau right back to the first known explorers and traces some of the main events to where we are today.

It's a good exhibition that sets that scene for the rest of the research which our class will be undertaking. I can share my understanding of the geography of the area and also have a shared discussion about some of the local areas and histories that class members are aware of.

The neat privilege of teaching this class is that it gives a chance to those who are either graduates, undergraduates or have not undergone any formal studies to get a taste of research in the sense that we do it daily without even giving it the formal term as for me, research is a daily/weekly activity that I undertake i.e. you don't have to have a degree to undertake research and that's one of the premises that I teach to demystify the term but to also discuss the differences between indigenous and western research models.

The other neat privilege about teaching this class is that I get to teach monthly weekend classes which require the class to be together for the weekend with shared meals from Friday night through to Sunday lunch time and this gives ample time for class members to get to know each other and also to talk in depth about the various topics that we undertake to discuss with the resources at hand via the library or internet.

We also have Tuesday weekend tutorials with an option of either a morning or evening tutorial whereby the class is able to discuss the weeks reading, the homework that is always set, to discuss the upcoming assessments and to generally learn new, often challenging, sometimes trying perspectives that may or may not equate with accepted non or indigenous practices.

But at the monthly weekend classes, the first half of Saturdays are for EOTC as it's called here as Education outside the classroom which I definitely encourage in that research should definitely not be just through the reading of books and literature but it's also about getting out into the community and observing, listening, considering, critically thinking, questioning etc. what is actually happening at a grass roots level.

To that end, we will also be climbing Mangere Mountain with a tour guide from the Mangere Education centre to get a better understanding of the Maori history behind the mountain, it's naming and the significance of the mountain from an indigenous perspective. We'll then have lunch together, weather permitting, and then retrace our steps back to campus for a debrief and more learning activities.

So much to do, so little time :) ...