In early May, when other Colby-Sawyer College students had finished their finals, packed up and headed home, students in the River Communities environmental studies course were embarking on the final leg of their class — a 13-day trip to the Colorado River watershed in Colorado and Utah.  

The nine students in the course spent the spring semester in the classroom studying the Colorado River system and the ways society struggles to balance both human and natural needs for fresh water. Professors Nicholas Baer and David Lutz co-taught the course, in which students studied and discussed water use and management, focusing on the societal needs for water, like potable urban use, agriculture and industry, as well as the need to sustain the biological functions of the river systems.

Baer and Lutz designed the field experience portion of the class to bring the classroom studies to life, allowing students to experience the varied landscapes in which the river flows and meet the stakeholders involved in each area. In the culmination of the course, the students and professors spent four days rafting down the river, studying its geology, hydrology and ecology and learning about the historical artifacts of Native Americans. 

River Communities is one of five courses in the Laura Sykes ’98 and Leon-C. Malan Field Studies Program. Each course focuses on a specific kind of environment — alpine, desert, river, marine, tropical — and marries a semester of in-class study with an intensive onsite experience. For many of the students in this year’s class, the trip was their first in an unfamiliar environment. 

“This year we had a group of students who had not traveled much further than the boundary of New England,” Lutz said. “Their experience traveling to another part of the country and seeing a totally different lifestyle, culture and landscape is always very enjoyable to me.” 

In addition to experiencing the surroundings, students met with stakeholders — an attorney in water law, the Denver municipal water representative, agricultural representatives, an expert in Native American history — who gave them new perspectives on the issues they’d studied. They also camped, hiked and fished, then reflected on each day’s experiences around the campfire at night. 

“The course was really amazing,” education major Noel Tripp ’28 said. “It really was just so cool to get to see everything we learned about … Without going out there I don't think I would've been able to truly understand how the water systems worked out there and how much the west is struggling with water.”

It is that dimension to learning that makes field studies courses so valuable, according to Baer and Lutz. Seeing students experience the real-life implications of the concepts they have been studying helps them to reinforce the issues in a meaningful way.

“I see the power of taking students to different places, and having them experience — hike, camp, raft — the outdoors as well as talk with people — stakeholders — who are having to engage in the issues as part of their livelihood and careers,” Baer said. “You can read and discuss the issues in a classroom, and we do before we travel to Colorado and Utah in order to build some foundational knowledge. Then we have them talk with and learn from the people trying to manage a very complex system of providing water for human needs while trying to maintain some ecosystem functions of the river system itself.”

Both Baer and Lutz participated in field study courses as undergraduates, and both talk about the power those experiences had for them. The memory of those journeys was a motivating factor in teaching a field studies course at Colby-Sawyer and helping a new generation of students have a similar eye-opening experience. 

“There is a difference between discussing an environmental challenge in a classroom 3,000 miles away and instead seeing it affect people sitting across a table from you,” Lutz said. “Sure, we talk about climate issues, natural resource usage, environmental policy and the water cycle using texts and slides and videos, but when you are standing in a dusty field with a farmer who is considering their crop rotation due to water rations, or on a raft with a river guide who laments how they have to cancel trips this year, it is absolutely more profound and real. Students start to realize that what we discuss on campus are real things happening to real people; that realization is very difficult to achieve in a classroom and is why I think field courses are a very important part of our curriculum.”