Fieldtrip Adopting an Orienteering Activity with Photography:

Aiming for Students' Autonomous and Active Learning

Abstract

This paper reports a new attempt to facilitate the autonomous and active learning in the setting of mixed class field-trip, consisting of both Japanese learners and Japanese native students. Previously, we had observed a few problems during the field-trip, e.g. lack of autonomous learning, decision making, and communication between both types of students. According to Kinugawa (2009), problems as such are often rooted in the lack of a suitable environment and students’ psychological and conscious disassociation from the performance of interaction. We adopted a game style activity, orienteering with photography, where we sat minor activities and goals. As a result we managed to facilitate autonomous and active learning. We will discuss the effectiveness of the activity after comparing comments by students with earlier studies.