First of all I would like to say that the fieldtrip is by far one of my most liked concepts in the scholarly world. One gets to engage in a learning environment outside the norm usually to fantastic new insightful results. The fieldtrips in my mind, of course, always end up being far more exciting than their based in reality counterparts. For example, I went to bed at 4 in the morning last night, partially due to the excitement of a fieldtrip the next day, partly due to a mistimely drunk(drunken, drank?) energy drink and slightly due to the fact I had to work til midnight and wanted to feel like I didn't waste my entire day. But I digress, the fieldtrip is what matters here. In my mind we were going to travel into this exotic old fashioned world of Edmonton, complete with snacks and happy helpers. What I got was one happy helper (yay
for the jolly bloke whose name escapes me), no snacks (thought I should have expected that), and an old fashioned world without the exotic hint. I do intend on following up on this further, for now I'm just hitting me quota yo.
Cheers!
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Your comment that the archives are "an old fashioned world without the exotic hint" stood out for me. I didn't really think too much about it, but it's interesting that a location that houses local historical documents is so "sterilized" and "controlled". I realize that in order to preserve the documents, they need to keep them in a climate controlled environment, but local history itself seems so messy... It's true that there is often one predominant version of a nation's history, but personal or communal history never seems, at least to me, as neatly packaged. Maybe I've watched too many movies that feature archives/libraries or have been to too many dusty libraries, but the archives almost seemed "exotic" to me in its orderliness.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I think it's all what interests you, because I find the archives to be an extremely interesting place, and I it's the "old fashioned world" that gets me. It's amazing to me that we have this storehouse of information where we can look up anything to do with Edmonton's history with relative ease. This being said, I should let it be known that I'm a big history nerd :)
ReplyDeleteI do agree the tour wasn't that exciting but it was cool to see how much effort goes into preserving the historical records, and what sort of document is deemed worthy of keeping.
I love how people tend to view the idea of a change of venue, or "field trip" as it were.
ReplyDeleteFor reference, I'm an education student, who has already done his IPT, so I was able to take part in one of these magical adventures.
Now that my credentials are in place, let me ask one question:
Why are the students NEVER as excited as the teacher on a field trip? Albeit the trip itself can be a bane on a teacher's life, especially with small children, the content of the trip is never fully appreciated by the students the way it is by the teacher.
The topic of this post and the comments so far seem to be all about the atmosphere of the archives, how it seemed exotic, or sterilized. It's almost as if it's more important to many people (myself included) that how a place looks and feels is more important than what lies inside it.
Maybe next time I attend a field trip I'll be sure to bring some juice boxes with me.