septième réunion technique seventh technical meeting ... - IUCN

A FIELD CENTRE FOR TEACHER TRAINING
BY
P. F. HOLMES
Warden, Mulham Tarn Field Centre,
Settle, Yorkshire, England
The Field Studies Council of England has now five Field Centres
in widely separated parts of the country and I am the Warden of one
of these at Malham Tarn, in the sparsely populated uplands of the
mid-Pennines. The Centre lies in fine limestone country but within
only 25 miles of a densely populated industrial region, so that large
numbers of town dwellers visit the district. With the actual buildings
of the Centre there is an estate consisting of a small calcareous lake,
a raised peat bog and adjacent marsh, some woodland and limestone
cliffs. Due to its great biological interest we have made this estate
into a Nature Reserve, through much of which the public can walk,
provided they keep to the road.
Staying at the Centre, usually for a week at a time, there are
fifty students for the eight months March to October, about 1350
passing through in a year. Of these about 60 per cent are pupils of
16 or 17 years of age from Grammar Schools, who come to the Centre
to take a week's field course in a biological subject or in geography.
Many of these students will become teachers in due course, either
going to a teachers' training college or to a university; I have in fact
had many teachers come back here with their own pupils, who originally
came themselves as students. The majority of the other 40 per cent
of our visitors come from training colleges and universities. There are
at least two special field courses each year for qualified teachers, many
of whom seem to have done no previous field work.
Field work in recent years has crept more and more into the
curricula of schools and colleges, so that there can be no doubt that
most of our students come with examinations at the back of their
minds. The staff at the Field Centres, however, are not concerned
primarily with examinations. One of my main aims on any course
is to open the eyes of students to what there is to see, to stimulate
their interest in a world they have not been aware of and to excite them
to further field work on their own. But another equally important aim
is to teach them how to behave in the country, how to look after it and
to make them realize by experience that there is such a thing as
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