In July, under a blistering hot sun, 15 students and environmental studies professor Dr. Eric Higgs waited to embark on a unique learning adventure at the Galiano Island Land Conservancy Learning Centre. During the following week, as part of the Ecological Restoration field school, the students share meals together and work intensely on group projects—off the grid, with no internet, and with the outdoor environment of the island’s District Lot 57 as their principal classroom. The lot, owned by the Galiano Island Conservancy Association, was once an active logging  and farming site. But now, it’s home to the Learning Centre, and Galiano Island residents want the land ecologically restored. That’s where the thinking, learning and labors of the students in the field school come in.

Northern Europe is famous for sustainability—from cycling in Copenhagen, Iceland’s geothermal riches, and offshore wind farms in the North Sea to Germany’s investments in mass solar power. This spring, 28 UVic geography students headed to Europe to study those sustainability efforts and more. Their month-long field school took them to Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands brought them together with community leaders, planners, developers, scholars and others to examine Scandanavian efforts to address the daunting ecological and social challenges facing contemporary societies.

Rowan Meredith is a UVic Slavic Studies student who attended the 2014 I-witness field school and is currently immersed in a summer co-op at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum. She sent these "notes from the field" while still in Europe.

The only ethnohistory field school in Canada to offer a firsthand learning opportunity involving traditional knowledges of oral history and research of historical documents has been immersing graduate students every second spring since 1998 deep within the Stó:lō community in BC.

UVic student Navarana Smith has been named as one of 10 Canadian undergraduates to win a 2015 3M National Student Fellowship, celebrating outstanding student leadership.

People who have mostly known only poverty and suffering have now found new hope, a sense of joy and a stronger community thanks to a recent University of Victoria Applied Theatre field school in India.

For Kathryn Juricic, a social sciences graduate, getting outside and seeing impacts of local work makes her passionate to continue this after her studies at UVic. Juricic began at UVic with the intention of moving on after her first year; however, after taking some environmental studies courses she didn’t want to leave. “I felt I wouldn’t receive the same calibre of learning and atmosphere anywhere else. I was surrounded by inspirational people who were bound together through learning and action,” explains Juricic.

The buildings may have been repaired, but two key segments of the population in the southeastern coastal region of India are still struggling to overcome the effects of the 2006 tsunami: seniors and rural youth. Now, a new UVic field school hopes to bring a sense of joy to these marginalized people by creating India’s first intergenerational theatre company. 

In May 2014, a group of UVic students and two faculty members spent three weeks in South Africa for UVic’s first-ever Colonial Legacies Field School.

Tess (Taylor) Syrowik is a humanities student in UVic’s Department of Linguistics. This is her personal account of UVic's 2014 Colonial Legacies Field School in South Africa, Apr. 28 - May 21. Learn more about the 2014 Colonial Legacies field school