River Studies in China
Geography River Studies
Our field work programs bring learning to life, with innovative program design, real world experience and expert staff.
We take our knowledge of the outdoors and education, fusing them together to create the best facilitated learning experiences ever.
Contact us for more information on your next: coastal studies, river studies, or environmental science program in China.
Experiential learning
We make good use of the experiential learning cycle, as working on a river environment can be challenging. We spend time away from the river front loading and briefing the students so when we are in, on and around the river the student groups can collect their data with a reasonable degree of autonomy. After each data collection is complete we review in small groups or as a whole, allowing students to share their findings with each other, reinforcing learning and helping to better prepare for following stages. This also creates a great teaching environment as many rivers are very noisy, so making use of some outdoor and indoor space away from the river creates a winning combination.
Safety
There is plenty of objective risk to manage in, on and around any small river environment. Our team carry out site inspections, written risk assessments and dynamic risk assessments for every venue we use. Not only that, we also bring safety to the forefront of the student learning experience by facilitating a session on risk assessment and risk management at the beginning of each course. In this way students become much more aware of the risks and hazards in and on the river which they are investigating and we encourage and facilitate them as they plan their own risk management on the river. This not only serves to make our programs safer but will help students plan for future geography river studies trips and apply simple risk management to their everyday lives.
Data Collection
Depending on requirements we can adapt your geography river studies program to a wide range of environments, age groups and curriculums. We can include everything from chemical tests and measurements, to creative science projects building river strainers and clinometers.
Technology
Outdoor education has been largely unchanged since the 1960s, where experiential education and outward bound research pointed the industry to use the outdoors as a personal and social development platform. Now as then, our activities are run, our reviews are done and we move on. But where outdoor education has been running along largely unchanged the modern classroom has undergone a technological transformation with projectors, multi media systems, one laptop per child, networked learning, and even virtual classrooms. So we thought its high time that we brought some of these classroom technologies into the field and integrated them into ‘new outdoor education’. We have micro laser projectors that can be used inside a tent, tablet computers, and action cameras. These technologies help everyone collect and share information and bring data to life. We have developed in house an open source flow meter showing river velocity that can be built with off the shelf parts.
Activities
Its not all work, we recognise that students learn best when they have time to play and relax on program. We build in plenty of structured team building, games and outdoor activities throughout their geography river studies program. These activities can include everything from country dancing, to rock climbing and raft building.
