Search

The ‘field’ is an integral part of international education at the tertiary level. Students are taken to the field in order to experience, first hand, the themes, processes and people that they learn about in the classroom. Despite the critical importance of the fieldtrip mode of teaching and the positive impact it has on learning, budget constraints mean that fieldtrips are becoming less common in tertiary curricula, especially when they involve learning about international topics. One potential way to counteract this is to identify how we might construct a ‘virtual’ field. This article reflects on this process in general and presents two case studies that attempt to bring the field to the classroom.

The world of wine is frequently cast in terms of a distinction between the Old World (the producers of Europe) and the New World (those in USA, Australasia, South America and South Africa). Although this is somewhat of a false dichotomy, it does suggest that New World wine is qualitatively different from the Old; it is less constrained by tradition and regulation and it is characterized by modern methods of production. Furthermore, New World producers - many situated on the periphery of the global economy - compete with one another on export markets, differentiating their products on the basis of price and style. In this context, New Zealand wine producers face stiff competition from Chile and Argentina, as they do for a range of commodities that they produce in common, such as fruit and forestry products.