Canoeing through the landscapes pictured in your U.S. history textbook, camping where battles in the textbook were fought, talking with individuals whose ancestors are discussed in the same book and earning course credit simultaneously?
Such is a class UW-Madison history Professor John Sharpless plans on teaching this summer. Sharpless will lead a group of students on a month-long trip down the Fox-Wisconsin River system in a four credit course titled, \The Fox/Wisconsin Passage: History and Ecology.""
""It's not like going to class on campus and going home because the campus will be the canoe trip and everyday it'll be moving,"" Sharpless said.
Originally, the course proposal was turned back to Sharpless because it was too expensive during a time when the state's $1.1 billion budget deficit makes university cuts inevitable.
""It was appropriate for the university to be concerned about the trip's budget,"" Sharpless said.
Between 15 and 17 students will start the trip May 28 in Oshkosh and finish June 21 in Prairie du Chien. An application process will begin next month or students can email Sharpless at jbsharpl@facstaff.wisc.edu.
The educational component of the course will be the ""camp days,"" Sharpless said, during which different faculty members along with local politicians and historians will lecture students along the river. Grades will be based on diaries students will keep about their experiences.
Sharpless said he has wanted to teach this kind of class for 10 years but other UW-Madison staff were ""not receptive"" to the idea until recently.
""We usually don't think of the humanities as leaving campus,"" he said. ""The mood has changed.""
Part of the reason attitudes changed, Sharpless said, was due to the success of another UW-Madison course offered last summer in which a trio of professors took a group of between 35 and 40 students on a bus trip in the American South. For 15 days, 12 of which were spent traveling, participants explored the history and culture of black freedom movements, focusing primarily on the civil rights era, but also on the longer history of slavery and emancipation.
""It was fantastic. It was the best teaching experience we ever had,"" said Steven Katrowitz, a UW-Madison history professor and organizer of the trip. Other faculty organizers included Timothy Tyson and Craig Werner, both Afro-American studies professors.
Tyson said there were multiple benefits to having this kind of a ""classroom"" experience.
""One [benefit] is that students are forced to make the connection between the matter they're studying and the lived reality of those experiences,"" Tyson said.
