The Departmental trip to Gettysburg is education and a 'bonding experience.'
April 21st, 2005 - With firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. Abe had a way with words, even if you have to stop sometimes and figure out what he meant. The first Communications club trip was a raging success.

The idea that a group of undergraduates would not only enjoy going to a historical place, but would pay their own money and do it without college credit is a bit astounding, if you stop to think about it. That is exactly what the club did though. 9 students and I took off in the early morening cross country to Gettysburg with the intention of having an education but fun three days.
The campground we chose was nice. We had to have one cabin (for the equipment, not the people) but most of the students camped out. The first day we arrived late, thanks to my driving the scenic route (part of making it an educational experience was to drive the length of Pennsylvenia, crossing the moutians and getting a chance to see the countryside. The students liked the scenery but were unimpressed with the route I chose.)

Anyway, the trip was suppose to be a learning experience, so we tried our best to make it one. I brought a half-dozen books on Civil War photography, including an excellent on on Gettysburg, and on our way into Gettysburg we talked for a bit about why the battle was important. People who drive to Gettysburg can still get a sense of why the battle was fought there, because the same roads that you drive into and out of town existed in the 1860s, Gettysburg was not much of a town, but it did boast a pretty serious crossroads.
On the second day of the trip we walked the battlefield from the first day's fighting to the third. I planned a couple of lectures, one on how battlefield monuments communicated through time and were placed by people who fought or had relatives who fought in the battle, and another on how education and technology combined to make the Civil War soldiers different that any before them, and a third on photography as popular culture among the soldiers who fought at Gettysburg. To my surprise the students listened and only made occasional fun of Professor Jackson.

The students during our travels used media equipment to practice shooting b-roll, photo essays, and try out various sorts of production techniques. The main point of the trip though was not the teaching of estoric subjects, or even to play with fancy technology, but to bond the students together as a group.

At night we had a nice campfire, and I made dinners in tinfoil. Although the camping we did was not very rough, there is no real way to do backwoods camping this close to a major tourist attractions and be environmentally friendly, the students reacted to the camping expericnce in a variety of ways. A few had never camped before, a few had camped extensively, but all enjoyed the fire and the experience of cooking over an open fire.

If I ever get a chance, I want to ask some of the students to write a narrative of the trip. The second day we continued exploring the battlefield, getting a glimpse of the devil's den and the round tops.
Al Leight uses one of our video cameras to shoot B-Roll of the battlefield.
The battlefield was beautiful, with long rolling grass covered fields, restored buildings, and tree covered mountains. One thing impressed the students, Pickett's Charge was a long walk.
The one disadvantage of the national park becomes apparent on the roundtops. The tour busses barely fit up on top of that hill, and the drivers are worse than New York cabbies in terms of the chances they take. But even dangerous bus drivers could not spoil the perfect view from on the of the hills.

Our last night, a few of the students went to the haunted houses in Gettysburg and we encountered something I have seen many times before: docents who make up history.

I first encountered this working for Historic Columbia Foundation in Columbia, South Carolina. Docents, being human, like to tell exciting stories. But not all Docents find history all that exciting. Instead, Docents will create this hyrbid, urban legend style history the consists of wive's tales and ghost stories. On top of Little Round Top I heard a bus driving Docent expound to the Iowan in his tour about the brave Iowan regiments that fought at Gettysburg. Being from Iowa myself, I was interested, but only mildly, as to this day I have been unable to discover the number of the Iowa Regiment which supposedly served there. I suspect that the bus driver is wrong (but I could also be wrong) and the Iowa audience was fed a story of an Iowa Regiment for their entertainment not for their education.

Anyway, the Ghost Tour was apparently more of the same.