I worked out last night that I have taught on 29 field
classes outside the UK – and been the leader of 28 of them. Three were in Normandy, France, at the start
of my career (see my blog of 7 September 2015), 12 were in Paris, and a further
14 have been in Berlin – where I am currently starting this while waiting for
my food to arrive in a traditional German bar.
The realisation that this is my last such class has led me to reflect on
some of the incidents from all those classes, and to seek (tongue in cheek) to
classify students in relation to their effectiveness in overseas fieldwork.
I should say at the outset that I have been extremely lucky
not to have faced any major disasters such as the hospitalisation of students,
or their arrest, or their total disappearance (short-term absences have been a
different matter). But in leading a
field class one has to be alert at all times – although some of the more
hair-raising escapades students get up to may only become known after they are
over. Experiences include …
- the time a girl, after a fair bit to drink and late at
night in the dark, climbed the ladder to the top of the water tower in a French
village;
- the pair of males who got the night train from Berlin to
Dresden (without any money) instead of the suburban train back to their hostel;
- the class where, when I rang the British consulate about
the third lost passport amongst our
students they replied ‘not you again’;
- taking a student who had dislocated a bone playing against
the village football team to a café in the next village where there was said to
be a bone specialist – who turned out to be an expert in resetting the bones of
horses;
- the occasion when the travel agent had given the party a
train time for a service that didn’t run on their day of departure, and I had
to commandeer a coach to get them to Paris for their return journey to the UK;
- the occasion when we waited 5 hours at Schönefeld Airport
outside Berlin for a flight that was eventually cancelled, with the airport
then closing for the night so that I was put to finding local hotel accommodation
for a group of 25 students at 2 in the morning – and initially paying for it
from my own credit card;
- arriving at a recently refurbished hotel where the room
numbers had not yet been replaced so that the desk clerk opened all the doors
for us with a pass key -and when the
students arrived back from a meal later in the evening they found that he had
also opened up their rooms to a number of other guests – who were now asleep in
their beds;
- the ex-athletes’ hostel in furthest out East Berlin where
we went out one morning and came back to find the door bricked up, a new
entrance provisionally cut in the wall at the back, and a new name for the
whole establishment. (That hostel, we
found out later, was opposite the Stasi’s interrogation centre: we just thought
it must be a military site surrounded by barbed wire.)
- being awakened at 4 in the morning in that same hostel in
a huge social housing estate in Berlin to hear ‘Barbie Girl’ being sung very
badly, in poor English with many of the words garbled; turning over to sleep
and cursing the Bulgarian party staying in the same hostel; and then being told
in the morning by the manager that it was our
students involved.
But what about the students?
Foreign travel probably brings out both the best and the worst in
them. I guess I have supervised around
725 students on these visits over the years
Here is a provisional classification.
I am afraid there is some gender stereotyping here, but I can defend it
(although I won't name names).
- · The ‘lads’. These are the ‘Adidas boys’ who lord it over everything and everyone in the UK and are the epitome of self-confidence. But when they get in a foreign environment they go to pieces. They have no sense of how to behave when all their assumptions about the world around them are shot away. They speak no foreign languages at all (quite proudly in some cases) and just cannot cope when abroad. Their only solution is to drink when given the chance to do so, which gives them more confidence, but makes them worse in the eyes of everyone who comes into contact with them – including their fellow students who realise that all their previous machismo was just a sham with no substance behind it.
- · The ‘bushel girls’. In class before leaving the UK these have been shy, quiet, never volunteering anything but very polite. They seem timid. I have some anxieties about them before we set off. But it transpires that they have friends abroad, have travelled on their own, are very well organised and are prepared to have a go and talk to local people – even trying out some French or German learned 5 years ago and not used since. At first the other students on the class don’t realise how effective these women are, but word gets around and by the end of the class they are the centre of attention, with others clamouring to join them in free time, or seeking their advice on projects. In many ways they are the antithesis to the ‘lads’ who have taken a dominant role in group interactions in England but who have failed to maintain that position abroad. These girls who have previously hidden their light behind bushels usurp their roles.
- · The disorganised (of both genders). It is a wonder how these have ever got to University. They lose their tickets, can’t read a map, don’t have a watch and forget that their mobile phone will tell them the time (except that they have probably forgotten to set it to continental time – at least that’s done for them automatically these days). They are waiting in a group with others to get on a bus and at the last minute they decide to rummage in their bag (which has too much irrelevant stuff in it) and the next we know is that the bus is pulling away leaving them at the stop. They get on a bus or metro and it takes them 20 minutes to realise they are going the wrong way – despite the many named stops or stations they have already passed. They never quite seem to know where they are, and the staff have to keep a special watch on them to keep them in the party.
- · The ‘dark horses’. These are often (but not always) men who are on the fringes of the ‘lads’ group described above. But there are a few women who fall into this category. These are students who suddenly show some stunning interest or esoteric knowledge that brightens up the whole class. Many years ago an otherwise unprepossessing student in Paris turned out to have a detailed knowledge of the life and works of Jean-Paul Sartre. He detached himself from the ‘lads’ and took others to join him on a pilgrimage of Sartre sites. Other students have sometimes come to me for advice on going to the theatre, classical music concerts, or the opera (in foreign languages without subtitles) and have persuaded others to join them. One year I took a group of 16 to a concert in Berlin that turned out to be the first time the majority had heard a symphony orchestra – and it was all at the suggestion of a ‘dark horse’ girl.
- · The ‘English abroad.’ This could cover lots of attributes (many revolving around gullibility in foreign clubs, and/or drink) but the one I’m thinking of is linguistic. Just because a group of three of our students don't speak a word of German, they shouldn’t assume that those with them in a U-Bahn carriage don’t speak a word of English. Had they realised the truth, our students might have had the sense to stop commenting on the clothing and personal appearance of their fellow passengers.
- · The ‘done-it-alls’. They are innocents but lack self-awareness. They are not trying to put their fellow students down, but they don’t recognise that others have not had the same life experiences that they have enjoyed. ‘When I was at a Mennonite wedding in Alsace’ was a killer starter line from one such girl.
- · The ‘groupies’ – not in the sense of trailing pop stars, but because they are totally dependent on being part of a group. So much so that they daren’t look at things other than their friends for fearing of missing something going on amongst the other group members. Take them to the top of the Television Mast in the Alexanderplatz in Berlin, or to the first stage of the Eiffel Tower (we could never afford the second or third stages) and they don’t look out but instead talk to and continue to interact with each other.
- · The misers. Although on many classes students are given a reasonable financial allowance to get one good meal a day, plus a snack lunch, these are the people who insist on subsisting on curry-wurst purchased from street kiosks, or baguettes from similar sources in France. I suspect that they save their money for drink. Anyway, by the end of the week they aren’t looking good, whatever the cause.
- · The food faddists. Yes, foreign food is different. But it would be reasonable to try it. One year all the students in Berlin ate every evening at Indian restaurants. I once took a student to Paris who claimed his doctor had advised him that for a gastric complaint he should eat rabbit every day (and we nearly managed to find enough different restaurants for him). And there is another syndrome here – the ‘ultimate choosers’. I like taking students out to eat with me, to places they would not otherwise have gone to. German menus are often very long – and it can take up to 10 minutes to translate every single item for the student who insists that they must know everything on offer before they can possibly choose. They generally end up with an unadventurous dish of chicken anyway. There are definitely fewer vegetarians among students today than there were 20 years ago, and I’ve not had to cope with a vegan for some years (although I had deliberately identified a good vegan restaurant in Berlin this time, just in case).
- · And then there are the middle-of-the-road students, the majority, for whom a foreign field class is a wonderful opportunity to find out something about the way of life in a different environment, who turn up on time at the right places, who listen, who observe, who take notes, and who make the whole thing worthwhile.
But whatever group individuals fall into the overwhelming
reaction of students to every foreign field class I have been involved in is
that it has been one of their best experiences at university. They have learned a lot – about the place
they have been to, or the theme of the class; about working in a group; about
others; and about themselves. Years later
graduates sometimes get in touch to say they have been back to the field site
and that ‘their’ district hasn’t changed (they get very possessive about neighbourhoods
they have got to know through their projects).
A number have taken their new spouse to their final year field study
destination for their honeymoon.
And from the point of an old-fashioned Geography lecturer
with a keen interest in what makes places unique, teaching on field classes has
been one of the greatest experiences of my career – despite the eccentricities
of student behaviour.
