Experiential Education Lessons for Instructors and Students: From a Nebraskan Ski Resort Zombie Subdivision to Zion’s Angels Landing

In May 2018, two professors of practice and five students embarked upon the inaugural resurrection of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s undergraduate and graduate Geography Field Tour course. The class, once an active mainstay in the early and mid-twentieth century, had long laid dormant. The following year, the same instructors, with tripled enrollment, led the course to the Colorado Plateau. After a COVID pause, the educators paved the way to the University’s first ever faculty-led Iceland course. Featured here are the initial two offerings of the resurrected Geography Field Tour class: 2018 within Nebraska and the southern Black Hills and 2019 focusing on the Colorado Plateau. Educational theory—including, but not limited to, the pedagogies of kindness and play and from scholars like Denial (2024), and Wyver (2019)—informed the classes. Instructors and students engaged in an immersive experience learning about the regional human and physical geographies in, and through which, they traveled. Place learning included national parks like Great Sand Dunes, Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, Zion, Canyonlands, Arches, and Rocky Mountain. Field experiential education is especially powerful, maximizing student growth professionally and personally via formal and informal lessons 24/7. In these course offerings, in addition to geography content, instructors employed a flexible curriculum for the traveling group from a comprehensive, holistic approach advancing professional, mental, physical, and community health. This was done, for example, via resilience building and leadership dexterity strengthening. This chapter not only reflects on-site field experiential education examples in Colorado, Nebraska, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Utah, but it also highlights lessons learned while resuscitating, ultimately recreating, a geography field tour course. Additionally, this work endeavors to provide other practitioners with inspiration, igniting their own experiential education planning.