Exhibition Highlights Architecture and Landscape Architecture Students’ Service-Learning Experiences in Czech Republic
March 11, 2008
Studying abroad is popular among Penn State students who want to explore a foreign country while earning college credits. But for some landscape architecture and architecture graduate students, studying abroad involves more than taking classes and seeing the sights. Since summer 2001, advanced students have traveled to the Czech Republic to provide pro bono landscape architectural services to agencies, municipalities and non-governmental organizations as a means of creating community with others in the central European country.
An exhibition highlighting the students’ personal impressions of places and experiences in the Czech Republic is on display in the Woskob Family Gallery in the Penn State Downtown Theatre Center through March 17. The Downtown Theatre Center is open Monday–Saturday, 10 a.m–6 p.m. In fall 2008, a similar exhibition will be on display at the National Czech and Slovak Museum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
Alumni connections with design professionals in the Czech Republic led to the establishment of the program, which includes trips every other summer (the next one will take place in 2009). Through work carried out by the students, the program has now facilitated eight projects in various locations, ranging from proposals for parks and open spaces to a study of a highway’s potential impact on an historic region. “The most important outcome has been discovering how people can come to common ground, in this case, through a shared vision of the landscape,” says Cecilia Rusnak, associate professor of landscape architecture and coordinator of the program.
According to Rusnak, the international service-learning effort helps to prepare students for the intercultural issues they will encounter in the landscape architecture and architecture professions. Through immersion in the culture and in professional work, the students gain an appreciation for cultural similarities and differences and for varying work styles.
The program has three components, including pre-trip readings and discussions, landscape architectural projects in the Czech Republic, and writing and discussion after returning to the United States. The students earn nine credits overall.
In summer 2007, the nine participating students began the six-week trip with an orientation period in Prague, where they discussed issues surrounding design and planning and preservation of natural and cultural resources. Then it was off to Decin, where the students participated in a two-week charrette in which they developed a proposal for a parks and open space system that was centered around Decin’s historic chateau. After visits to Dresden and Berlin, Germany, and a few free days for personal travel, the students ended the trip with a 10-day charrette in Turnov, where they studied the possible ramifications for a highway that is proposed to run through the Cesky Raj, a UNESCO Geopark.
According to Rusnak, working with design professionals in the Czech Republic enables a kind of active learning impossible to achieve in the classroom. “The service-learning model of immersion in active work with community-based problems, followed by structured reflection, is attractive to educators but rarely feasible in traditional curricula.”
In addition to residents of the Czech Republic, over the years the Penn State teams have included individuals from the United States, Canada, Australia, China, India and Serbia, which has given the enterprise a truly international perspective. Rusnak says the students are treated as true professionals, and that their viewpoints are valued. “The students try to leave a positive imprint through the ideas they generate,” she adds.
In a report after the summer 2007 trip, Jan Mocek, director of the Czech Protected Landscape Areas Administration in Turnov, summarized the mutually beneficial nature of the project: “It was a fascinating and rare opportunity to learn from each other—together we built a long, multi-lane highway bridge across the Atlantic.”
Contact: Amy Milgrub Marshall, alm157@psu.edu or 814-863-2104