School Trips and Learning

I’ve recently returned from a 6-day school trip to Greece with 22 Classical Civilisation students in Years 10-12. It was wonderful: we saw three sites I’d not visited before (Sounion, Tiryns, and Eleusis), and I enjoyed reconnecting with the Athenian acropolis and the sanctuaries at Delphi and Olympia, as well as discovering that there’s more to Epidaurus than the theatre.

School trips take a lot of planning, organising and energy, and I’m very grateful to J, our Head of Classics, for meticulous administration, enthusiasm and ambition, and Hellene, our tour company, whose itinerary and administration were superb.

What stood out to me on this trip was the learning taking place both through the visiting/viewing of sites/artefacts which the students had explored in the previous terms, and the interaction between students and teachers to develop this knowledge.

I’m sure the GCSE students will remember the corbelling, killing-gates and galleries of Tiryns much more effectively now that they’ve walked them in person, and the A Level students can now understand more deeply the layout of Delphi and Olympia, and the central locations of the Temple of Apollo and the Temple of Zeus within them. They can now also place the sites in their landscape – Delphi up in the mountains, Olympia in a verdant plain. The Year 12s were excited to find the Aphrodite of the Agora in Athens, and took great delight in describing the key features to us, while the Mycenaean room of the National Archaeological Museum helped students to understand the scale of artefacts (surprised that the bull’s head rhyton was smaller than they expected, but the pithoi much larger), as well as the extent to which Mycenae was ‘rich in gold’.

Year 11 students explained the Homeric World artefacts to the Year 10s, and the Year 12s taught the different periods of Greek sculpture to the Year 11s. This is Paul Kirschner’s Generative Learning in action – teaching is one of the eight strategies for generative learning, which he presented at ResearchEd last September. He explained that learning should bring about a change in long-term memory through cognitive processing that links prior knowledge to new information. The Year 11s, who have been revising their CC GCSE content for a few weeks, were able to link their understanding of Linear B to the tablets they saw in front of them in the National Archaeological Museum, as they explained them to the younger students. In looking for the tablet Ta641 from Pylos, which details tripods and goblets, I found I had to distinguish it from similar tablets and engage with the writing system in detail to identify it for the students – some learning for me too!

I also thought of Lave and Wenger’s ‘Situated Learning and Legitimate Peripheral Participation’, whose fundamental premise is that learning is a social process, with learners moving from novice (peripheral participation) to expert (full participation) through interactions with those more fully embedded in the community of practice (of being a classicist). I saw A Level students talk to GCSE students about what it means to be a Sixth-Form classicist, and likewise, the teachers talk to the Year 12s about undergraduate Classics study. The social aspect of this learning, and the ability to observe and engage in discourse with those a step further along the lifelong journey of studying the ancient world, really struck me on this trip.

It’s no mean feat taking teenagers abroad for 6 days, particularly after a long term, but the benefits for students’ learning and connections are worth it.

Thanks to J and Hellene for masterminding these wonderful opportunities for the students and the teachers who accompanied them.