Amazon Interdisciplinary Field School will take KPU students on a journey to Colombia

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Kwantlen Polytechnic University students can apply for the Amazon Interdisciplinary Field School to get an opportunity to travel to Colombia and stay near the Amazon River. Applications are open until Friday. 

The field school will take place from May 1 to 16 next year and engage students in local culture, history, and current issues through an interdisciplinary approach. 

Students will spend time engaging with local communities at Calanoa Natural Reserve on the shore of the Amazon River and visit museums and historical sites in Bogotá, the capital city of Colombia. They will also tour Indigenous villages, participate in workshops, trek through the rainforest, and boat down the Amazon River, among other activities.

The field trip is a six-credit course led by two instructors from design and arts programs who develop the topics and plan the field school. 

This time, it is Marlis Joller, an interior design program instructor at KPU who has led the program twice, and Fabricio Telo, a sociology instructor at KPU joining Joller for the first time. 

Some of the topics of the field school include sustainability, conservation, community development, and Indigenous perspectives. 

“I’m really excited that Fabricio is bringing in the sociology background and challenging the students to go deeper into a socio-economic context,” Joller says. 

“I teach a course on global inequalities, and this is a topic that I will try to also introduce for students, understanding their positionality as students from the global north visiting the global south,” Telo says, adding he will consider the implications it brings in terms of how students will interact with the people there. 

The course and field school consist of pre-departure classes that run from January to April,  during which students will research, examine selected topics, and present them to their peers, Joller says.

Students then travel to Colombia for two weeks where they will journal and sketch in notebooks to gain a better understanding of the place. There will also be a book review discussion and a final sustainability project, Joller says.

She adds the field school fits students from any discipline since the course touches on different topics. 

“It offers a really rich, interdisciplinary experiential learning opportunity, probably the most experiential in terms of their exposure from different learning methods,” Joller says.

“It’ll enrich [students’] creativity, imagination, esthetics, academic research, ecology, conservation, environmental consciousness … [and] social aspects. It has an opportunity to open up from so many different levels.”

Telo adds the field school also offers a transformational experience to get to know about a new country and its lifestyle.

“I believe that education plays a very important role in transforming people for the better,” Telo says. “So I think getting to know people who live a very different style of life and having the opportunity to connect with nature for an entire week can be very transformational.”

He adds he has heard interesting stories about students who developed a completely new perspective on their life through the trip.

The estimated field school fee is $3,835 and covers all travel within Colombia such as transportation in Bogotá, local instructors, lecturers and guides, and entrance fees to museums and local attractions, among other expenses.

International flights, students’ personal spending budgets, additional transportation costs and meals, and KPU tuition for the course are not covered in the fees. 

There are also KPU scholarships available for students to apply for, which closes on Friday, and outside sources like the B.C. Study Abroad Consortium, Telo says.

For more information, visit www.kpu.ca/studyabroad/field-schools/amazon-2025#application. 

Students can also reach out to Marlis Joller at marlis.joller@kpu.ca or study abroad coordinator Shanell Wong at internationalprograms@kpu.ca.