Building a Sense of Community: Field Activities at a Distance
The UC California Naturalist Program (CalNat) offers naturalist certification courses throughout the state. Under normal circumstances, these courses focus on hands-on, experiential learning in the field. In Spring 2020, the UC Davis CalNat course, Wild Davis, operated fully online, forcing a significant restructuring of activities. Group field activities were primarily replaced with online community and citizen science projects such as iNaturalist, which allow students to submit observations from their own backyard, compare their observations to other records, and see their classmates’ observations. Dr. Gerhart-Barley talks about how these projects provided an opportunity for field activities and helped build a sense of community despite geographic distance.
