Well we decided to lift the restriction that we placed last year when we limited ourselves to 13 and go back to the usual number of 24 students. During the bulk of the field school they will be divided into two camps of 12 each and we do not foresee any time when we will need to move all of them at the same time but only half at a time plus 3-4 instructors. Last year Dave Reedy and I used our personal cars as field school vehicles for errands and short basic trips. We will probably need something to cover for the fact that we won't be having them in the mix this year.
While I understand the value of decreasing the carbon footprint, this is a field school that has always emphasized maximal encounter with the environment in as many different sorts of situations as possible. We would love to be able to have them hike to and camp in multiple different environments where they could learn from each. Ideally it would be possible to work our way around parts of Kaua`i without a vehicle except to bring in the supplies and other needs of the camp. We have not planned that well for this year, but it is well worth working on for 2012... Lawai to Limahuli without using gas or a paved road?
That being said, we expect to have the students spend about 50% of their time in proximity to human cultural areas where they can be learning ethnoecology/conservation, ethnography, etc. field methods, and the other 50% in area that are remote where they can be learning natural history, ecology/conservation, environmental measurement, etc. methods. Perhaps your suggestions for campsites in remote places could be brought on-line this year and maybe you also have suggestions for camp sites that are near "town" where the students can stay in a field or forest but are close enough to get to a community to make observations and conduct interviews without using a vehicle?
We changed our format some based on feedback from this last year and comments from some really good students who has been asking about participating but not being able to do so. We plan to offer a basic field school just from January 2-28 then an advanced program for 2 more weeks. The final two weeks will be much more docile with focus on students conducting community projects and learning techniques through application. We are expecting a much lower participation in the second half (probably half) and a much higher demand for the first since it now fits fully within the North American "J-term". We have also been corresponding with the dean of the Mie University Biological Sciences School who is planning on sending a mix of agriculture and anthropology students. We have no idea how many will apply from Japan. So, as with you, our Japanese "program" is a little up in the air.
OK, so back to the question of group size and service project. We have a lot of work to do within the field school and I would love to see a selection of possible service projects because it is likely that one or more could be worked in as part of the curriculum. That may be asking too much so feel free to just suggest what you think really needs to be done. We should have 24 students and 3-4 staff at the camp site in the first few days of the school for basic training in safety, working with plants, local culture, research & camp protocol, ethics, and a variety of related subjects. An introduction to the cave site would be ideal here. After that the camp will be split and half of the students will go up to the forest (BSA camp at Koke`e) and several more staff will show up to lead them in training focused on ecology/conservation, environmental measurement, etc. The remainder will staff at low altitude and begin to learn ethnography, ethnoecology/conservation, etc. After about 8 days (depending on weather) the camps will switch and the experiences will be crossed over. This is part of our experimental design for measuring student success and evaluating our teaching modules, giving us two different data points in one field school. After the second period, everyone will come back together at the base camp for work that will culminate with training at NTBG research/herbarium with enough time (not like last year!) for them to process their specimens and final basic lessons.
We will break for two days before the advanced course starts.
The advanced course will start with discussions at NTBG, hopefully with NTBG staff and others from the community, about possible short-term projects that the students can complete in the coming week. Brian, Mike Huddleston, and Kim traveled around and pulled together ideas for some of these and hopefully between now and December we can learn about a variety of others that can become tangible. The students need to select a project that is meaningful to them. Neither Kim nor I believe in assigning students to work on tasks that are not of interest to them, however it is obvious that when presented with good ideas, students usually jump on them. Hopefully, Kawika and others will get a chance to see the students in action and be able to pick out one or two who are desirable to work on a specific project rather than having to work with people who may or may not be ideal.
We expect that many of the students will do projects that center on needs of NTBG since that is the closest focus and the staff may have time to come up with ideas. However, we are hopeful that there will be at least one interesting non-NTBG project in the community that can start to build some new bridges for all of us. Who knows.