Developing a One-week Fieldwork Course

We are Kristian, Pieter, Marijn, and Peter, and we've spent 10 weeks in Hanoi, Vietnam for a multi-disciplinary project as part of our master. For our project we developed a fieldwork course for the bachelor of the Hanoi University of Natural Resources and Environment, working closely together with the teaching staff. Our project was part of the bigger project "Climate Proof Vietnam" by Delft University, Twente University, HUNRE, and Thuy Loi University, also in Hanoi. 

Conducting fieldwork is an important learning experience for students, but the bachelor of HUNRE contains very little of it. For our project, we set out to develop a one-week fieldwork course, to be given to third-year bachelor students of HUNRE. To do so, we met with the teaching staff and discussed the current fieldwork in the bachelor, and their desires for the fieldwork to be developed. We also assessed the available equipment and resources, as well as the regular study program of the bachelor. We also visited multiple potential locations for the fieldwork to take place and tested some of the experiments we wanted to include. After having found the right location and chosen the experiments we wanted to include in the fieldwork, we wrote a manual both for the teaching staff and the student staff, including for each experiment an explanation of the underlying theory, a step-by-step guide, and reflective questions for the students to answer. We also re-organized the lab at HUNRE where all the equipment was stored, writing manuals on how to use, clean, and store each piece of equipment. Equipment that missing we made ourselves or ordered; broken equipment was replaced or repaired.

We had an amazing time in Vietnam, and it was a very valuable experience to live and work in another country. We hope our work has contributed to improving the education of engineers in Vietnam. We’ve met many, many different people, and got to see Vietnam, its people, and culture from a perspective that you would never get as a tourist. We got to work very closely with the teaching staff, and always felt very welcome!