Are study trips a leisure time for students and teachers?

Abstract

Few curricular programmes recognize officially the study trips and only occasionally some schools make efforts to realize some particular ones. Even so, they aren’t considered as a basic educational strategy, fundamental to seduce students about the landscape architecture and to explore the power of the landscape. The study trips can no more be seen as leisure time for students and teachers. As real opportunity of experiment the space - the object of work of the landscape architect - they are a basilar educational strategy in landscape architecture. The study trips are fundamental for students become familiar with the landscape, comprehend it, reflect about and be critical (as students and as future professionals). More than that, they are the opportunity to include and make in evidence a wide range of specific issues concerning landscape (humanistic, artistic and scientific principles, together with a comprehensive and inclusive view), at the same time, they introduce the students in the diversity and the complexity of processes, domains and actors involved in the landscape transformation. For all reasons it is fundamental ‘to put students in the landscape’. So, study trips should be created in all curricular programmes, establishing the connection between academic, curricular and disciplinary issues. This educational strategy has to be accompanied with others (group reflection, graphic diaries, meta-cognitive scripts, portfolios, documentaries, and reports, between others). Only this way we can expect students to learn ‘how to see’, ‘how to do’ and ‘how to be’ - ideas conceptually engaged in the process of landscape architecture.