expedition kAeng krAChAn

Coke Smith, Curriculum Leader Environmental Science

Ithinkmost teachers would agree that there is no better education that hands-on experiential learning to make our courses real to students. In particular, in a class like Environmental Systems and Societies (ESS), only so much learning can happen in classrooms and with textbooks. There needs to be plenty of outside time studying the actual environment!

Thank goodness we seem to be past the COVID era and we are able to do multi-day overnight trips once again. Although we have the awesome Outdoor Classroom, which we consider to be an essential tool for training our students in necessary skills, there is no replacement for actual field time in a truly wild environment, such as Kaeng Krachan National Park.

Bangkok Patana School has a long-standing relationship with Kaeng Krachan, which allows our students to spend several days in various habitats exploring and learning about the subtropical ecosystems of this World Heritage Site. For five days, students from Caroline Ferguson and Coke Smith’s ESS classes explored this amazing place.

For two full days, ESS students learned field techniques for measuring various abiotic features of the aquatic stream ecosystem such as dissolved oxygen, pH, total dissolved solids, electrical conductivity, stream velocity and many other quantitative factors. Students also spent hours performing biotic indeces of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, counting and identifying invertebrates and then attempting to make connections between the biotic and abiotic factors.

The trip then culminates in a day and a half of student-directed research where our students devise their own research questions and protocols. After detailed discussions, students conduct actual field studies, collecting and processing their own data and writing reports presenting their findings in class in the coming days.

While in such an amazing place as Kaeng Krachan, of course we all spent a lot of time simply viewing wildlife and experiencing the nature around us. We enjoyed the near constant company of the ever-curious Dusky Langurs and Giant Black Squirrels, as well as countless species of birds. We even had a lunch-time visit by one of the rarest Ursids on earth – the Sun Bear, a threatened species that is nearly impossible to see in the wild.

I am constantly impressed with how our young people conduct themselves on these field expeditions. This group in particular was such a pleasure to be with in the field. Their enthusiasm and curiosity was truly spontaneous and genuine. As a teacher with nearly four decades of experience, seeing such bright young minds in action always inspires me. These students give me hope for our future!