Field schools
The Colonial Legacies Field School in South Africa is a three-week experiential-learning course taking place in rural and urban South Africa.
The Ethnohistory Field School is an opportunity for graduate students to live and work in partnership with the Stó:lō First Nations.
The Canada’s Internment Era Field School – the first post-secondary course dedicated to the internment and dispossession in Canada. In July 2019 ten students and ten teachers embarked on a five-day tour of the former sites of the Japanese Canadian internment. East Lillooet was the final stop in the tour.
Ethnohistory Field School
The Ethnohistory Field School is a fabulous opportunity for history and other graduate students to live and work in partnership with the Stó:lō – the Indigenous people who have made the Fraser River Valley and Fraser River Canyon home for thousands of years. It is a partnership between the University of Victoria, the University of Saskatchewan, the Stó:lō Research and Resource Management Centre, Stó:lō Nation and the Stó:lō Tribal Council.
Every second spring since 1998 graduate students and faculty from the Universities of Victoria and (since 2002) Saskatchewan move into Stó:lō territory, board for a week with Stó:lō families, and live the rest of the month-long field period in a longhouse. Working together with Stó:lō mentors, staff and elders, students work on a research project that the Stó:lō have identified as important to them.
For the student participants, this kind of hands-on, participatory, live-in-the-community research is education in its truest sense. Students not only learn about history and ethnohistorical methods (which are practical and employment skills) their worlds are expanded, attitudes transformed and relationships forged.
Normally offered every other year in the summer.
Colonial Legacies Field School in South Africa
A 3-unit experiential-learning course taking place in rural and urban South Africa.
Spend three weeks in South Africa and learn on-the-ground about impacts of colonial histories in everyday life and on rural and urban landscapes; sustainable rural development; apartheid and reconciliation; grassroots anti-poverty initiatives; community responses to HIV/AIDS; gender and development; land, labour and global economy; modes of historical memory.
Field school faculty: Dr. Elizabeth Vibert
Third and fourth year students from all disciplines are welcome to apply.
Colonial Legacies Field School, in time for South African national election
Interview from South Africa with CBC Radio (Dr. Elizabeth Vibert and two students from the field school, May 2014).
Canada’s Internment Era Field School Project
Canada’s Internment Era – a Field School
Learn Canada’s Internment History in the Places Where It Happened
Victoria-Vancouver-Hope-Greenwood-Kaslo-New Denver-Slocan Valley
Taught by:
Jordan Stanger-Ross, Associate Professor of History and Project Director of Landscapes of Injustice and prominent leaders from the Japanese-Canadian community
In this 2-week intensive summer field school, 10 UVIC graduate and undergraduate students and 10 in-service teachers recruited from across Canada travel to sites of Japanese-Canadian internment in the interior of BC, in a tour co-organized and co-led with the Nikkei National Museum. We then spend a week in seminar at UVIC. This course emerges from Landscapes of Injustice, major national research project centred at UVIC and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Grant program. Dr. Jordan Stanger-Ross, as the Director and lead researcher of Landscapes of Injustice, is able to offer this course collaboratively with leaders and leading organizations from the Japanese Canadian community. In addition to learning the history of internment and dispossession, this class provides rich opportunities to interrogate the purpose, importance, and meaning of the past. Dr. Stanger-Ross hopes all students leave the course thinking about public history: How do museums, heritage sites, and elementary and secondary teachers convey history? What do scholars and partners outside of the academy offer to each other? What roles can historical learning can have in broader democratic life and practice?