Under one of the bridges along Saigon's Nhiêu Lộc–Thị Nghè Canal, we found a space that was noisy, dirty, and smelled pretty bad. Not exactly somewhere you'd want to spend much time.
But someone was living there. And that led to one of the most interesting conversations of our field trip. What feels unpleasant or unsafe to one person might provide much-needed shelter and a sense of refuge to someone else.
Last weekend, I joined my colleagues Jesse (Integrated Sciences) and Izzy (Literature) at Fulbright University Vietnam for a field trip with students from our three courses. We spent the morning exploring the canal, each of us approaching the same environment from a different perspective.
One of my favorite parts was learning from Jesse and Izzy. I'm used to looking at places through the lens of psychology, but I learned so much from the questions they asked and the ways they approached what we were seeing. It was genuinely fun to be a student alongside my students.
A couple of days later, the psychology and ecology classes came back together to compare their observations. The conversation about the bridge continued, eventually touching on homelessness, dignity, and how easily we overlook people and places that are out of sight.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make learning more experiential. But this experience reminded me how much fun teaching can be when we step outside our own disciplines and learn alongside each other.
Already looking forward to doing more of this with my colleagues.
