Learning Through Fieldtrips: Institutional Experience, Student Involvement and Skills for Life

Because they emphasise applied experiential learning, field trips have a special place in education. This presentation will offer a summary of the results of, and lessons learnt from, the LTDF project ‘Fieldtrips in an age of uncertainty: Data, pedagogy and guidance at the University of Glasgow’. Despite their generally acknowledged pedagogical value and widespread use across University teaching, fieldtrips are not centrally documented. Field trips provide considerable benefits that are hard to recreate in the classroom. These include the provision of memorable experiences, practical orientation, place based pedagogy and rapid feedback (Jones and Washko 2022) and the provision of alternative forms of learning such as embodied learning (Jickling et al. 2023). The scope of our preliminary study is a documentary review of field trip provision across three schools and two colleges to ascertain common practice relating to objectives and means of providing field trips. The study has taken place between February and April of 2026, focussing on the Business School, School of Social and Political Science, School of Geography and Earth Science and School of Biodiversity. This research will establish a repository of guidance on field trips as a first step. Building on this, we aim to include further schools (e.g. School of Humanities, Archaeology) to develop the project further. At the L&T Conference, we will present our findings from the documentary review. Fieldtrips are of crucial importance for their ability to expand learning beyond ‘prescribed’ and ‘incomplete’ learning objectives (Jickling et al. 2024). Here we see the potential for transferable, work-based skills, life skills and graduate attributes. Fieldtrips should not be confused with ‘outward bound’ adventure-based education, but seen as a compassionate and inclusive reconstruction of education in a new environment, requiring planning and empathy to make available to all. Because inclusivity is broad and complex, it cannot be a focus of this study, although we acknowledge its importance and feel this could be a worthwhile follow-on study. Amongst the skills identified by the ILOs, skills contributing to employability are separated out and examined in detail. This process is assisted by the broad disciplinary background of the research team behind the project, offering a broad base of knowledge for disciplinary and transdisciplinary skills, as well as a profound understanding of employment-related challenges in STEM subjects, the business world and in social sciences.