Against all Odds: Experiential, Collaborative and Service Teaching during the Strange Days of Remote Instruction

Abstract

The academic year 2020/21 presented serious challenges for teaching and learning. One of the major difficulties was to maintain the standards of experiential learning despite the switch to online/dual instruction modalities and the sudden withdrawal of funds that were already allocated, precisely when there was more need of them than ever in order to create alternative experiential learning opportunities. Despite these obstacles the Science Track courses of the Cooperstown Graduate Program managed to continue to provide the experiential learning projects that are part and parcel of their curriculum, with the added value of also maintaining and cultivating the collaborations with external institutions from our surrounding communities for whom these projects are an essential service, at a time when they most needed the support that CGP is well known to provide through service teaching. The projects include the design of activities for the Wings of Eagles Discovery Center in Horseheads, NY; research on public gardens on Otsego county for the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Cooperstown, NY; the creation of an audio guide to historic buildings and sites in Little Falls, NY for the Little Falls Historical Society; and the participation in an international educational collaboration to reproduce the measurement of the circumference of the Earth by the Greek polymath Erathostenes in the 3rd century BC. All these activities could be performed in compliance with all restrictions and limitations that were in effect at any given time; most of them were carried out outdoors. We present a brief summary of these projects and a status report of our plans to make the outputs of Science Track projects like these publicly available through a dedicated public online repository.