All J-Term Field Colloquia must feature 30 hours of in-class instruction and 12 hours of hands-on experiential education, community-based learning, or fieldwork. These activities shouldn't be optional add-ons; they must be woven directly into the course structure and remain essential for exploring the course's core question.
Fieldwork is experiential learning where students actively generate knowledge within their local context. They do this by observing, interacting, interviewing, gaining practical skills, and learning how a specific site functions as both a physical place and an object of study.
Designing effective fieldwork assignments is key to a successful J-Term. The five categories below provide examples of successful assignments from previous semesters, including the location and course description for each.
These examples show how faculty successfully connected hands-on activities to the course’s guiding question by:
This set of sample assignments doesn't treat the field site as a mere backdrop. Instead, they help students learn how a location functions as both a subject of academic study and a source of new, community-contextualized knowledge. To achieve this, the assignments combine a structured field activity with guided instruction and reflection exercises.
Interviews are a great way for students to interact with community members directly. They can elicit a life biography, request information, follow up on field observations or community activities, or gather qualitative data on viewpoints or opinions. Conducted as casual conversations or formal meetings in either one-on-one or small-group settings, these assignments are designed to build local relationships and deepen undergraduate understanding of site-specific perspectives and community issues.
In this set of sample exercises, students assume specialized professional, civic, or institutional personas to execute field-based site evaluations and engage with hypothetical scenarios. They use the fieldwork component as an empirical scouting phase necessary to practice critical thinking, structured debate, and evidence-based advocacy from multiple, conflicting stakeholder perspectives.
These assignments focus on the application of academic concepts to real-world community issues, organizational challenges, or policy development. The fieldwork provides a basis for collaborative workshops where students work in teams to innovate site-specific projects and apply course concepts to create professional-level content using media, design, or data analysis tools.
These exercises task student teams with preparing and presenting a creative project — such as a performance, photo slideshow, short story, video diary, or soundscape — that contextualizes their experience and demonstrates a deep, critical engagement with the fieldwork site.
