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Columns::October 6, 2003
UGA will help lead $35 million project to improve education
Licensing, royalty income increases by more than 9 percent in FY2003
Reversing trends: Institute of Government fellow heads up study of ‘persistent poverty’
UGACard office updates ID cards
Hudson Institute senior fellow will give 2003 Brooks Lecture
Film series traces ‘path to power’
UGA welcomes new faculty
The faculty perspective
Field trip
Campus News
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UGA students Roth Friar (left), Sarah Marchand (top center, with hat) and Abby Stone (right) and EARTH University students assess the damage done by black sigatoka, a fungal disease, in a Costa Rica banana plantation. (Photo by Dan Rahn)
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Live and learn
Students immerse themselves in ‘extraordinary educational culture’ during study-abroad class to Costa Rica
By Dan Rahn
drahn@uga.edu
Attending a 6 a.m. lecture on plant pathology was merely unusual. What followed was nothing short of extreme education for
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| At left, UGA student Justin Jackson learns a little more than he wanted to about artificial insemination during a study-abroad class in Costa Rica. (Photo by Dan Rahn) |
16 students in a UGA study-abroad class this summer.
In a nearby banana plantation, the students wrestled with the lecture topic firsthand, detailing the damage done by black sigatoka, a fungal leaf spot disease that’s threatening banana crops worldwide.
As they puzzled through their assignments, they contended with intermittent rains and steamy tropical heat while warding off biting bugs and keeping a wary eye out for the snakes that slither through the leaf litter underfoot.
From there, they studied the ecosystem from which the banana fields had been carved, trudging through the tropical rain forest’s muddy trails and carefully noting its biodiversity.
When the exhausting schedule wound down, the students had completed another 15-hour day of learning.
The next grueling day would start with breakfast at 6 a.m. “I can’t believe I’m excited about getting to sleep in until 10 minutes to 6,” said Brent Lopp, a junior horticulture major.
“The students have as many contact hours in these 18 days as they normally would in a semester,” said Wayne Parrott, a UGA professor of crop and soil sciences who coordinated and taught the course, “Agriculture and Ecology in Tropical America,” along with UGA horticulture professor Mark Rieger.
For two and a half weeks the students slogged through Costa Rica’s luxuriant rain forests, probed its misty cloud forests and verdant dry forests, hiked its imposing volcanoes, combed its beaches and examined its ample agriculture.
They saw fields of bananas, pineapples and other tropical fruits; coffee, cocoa, flowers, ferns; row crops of onions, potatoes, cabbage; and beef cattle and crops from cassava to rubber to sugarcane to timber. They waded through jungles and
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| At right, Krista Martin, in a Costa Rican cloud forest dairy, gets instructions on how to milk a cow. (Photo by Dan Rahn) |
hiked mountain trails. Through it all, the students battled blisters, exhaustion, injuries and illness.
It’s intense education, but it’s fun.
The Costa Rica class is one of five study-abroad courses offered through the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. It’s one of more than 80 offered by UGA in more than 40 countries.
“The class was more intensive than I thought it would be,” said Jason Check, one of two non-UGA students in the course (which provided the last three credit hours he needed to graduate from Georgia Tech). “We put a lot of work into this course. I’m taking a lot out of it. It’s definitely a deeper educational experience than you could get otherwise.”
Throughout the trip, the students recorded how plant species in these families varied between the rain forest, cloud forest and dry forest ecosystems, for 15 percent of their grade.
The rest of the grading came on pre-trip and post-trip position papers, the collective discussion answers to each day’s “question of the day,” a directed project on some aspect of tropical America, a presentation on a tropical organism and discretionary points based on their discussion input.
The course design makes it much like 16 simultaneous directed individual studies. Students get the course credit in their choice of crop and soil sciences, horticulture, anthropology, ecology or geography.
“It takes me more work to do this course than it does a regular, semester-long class,” Parrott said. “And I’m only one of two teachers for the course.”
But the work pays off in an extraordinary educational culture.
“Study abroad isn’t simplistic,” said Erin Sullivan, a James Madison University student from North Salem, N.Y. “You’re not just looking at agriculture. You’re learning about the culture, the society, the environment, the land. It’s a much richer learning experience.”
MORE INFO
Annual study-abroad fair
The 80-plus UGA study-abroad courses and many other universities’ programs will be spotlighted Oct. 7 during the Study, Work and Travel Abroad Fair. Nearly 100 exhibitors will have information on their programs from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Georgia Hall of the Tate Student Center.
MORE PHOTOS
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