Program Overview

The Field Tools Bootcamp is a two-week residency program that simulates a variety of challenging fieldwork contexts in order to engage our residents' capacities for problem-solving and critical thinking. The bootcamp program is designed especially for early-career social development practitioners as well as graduate students of development studies, anthropology, and other disciplines that emphasize fieldwork.

Our program offers a highly customized curriculum and an experiential learning environment. We challenge residents to think critically and to work effectively during times of stress and periods of adjustment to fieldwork settings. Residents and facilitators review and debrief at the end of each day about the physical and emotional challenges they encountered. We use discussion seminars to raise questions about global developmental practices in order to raise our collective self-awareness of the connections between theory, prescripts, practice, and the human experience of 'development'.

Our Philosophy and Mission

Sustainability is a loaded concept. Interpretations of 'sustainability' vary from person to person, yet achieving a sustainable future is a collective challenge for the global community. Often, to practice sustainable living involves rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty.

Field Tools Bootcamp residents are invited to visit Berkshire County to realize an immediate connection between the Earth and the enormous diversity of life for which it provides. We also invited students to come learn how working to realize sustainable futures can be both self-gratifying, but also physically taxing and viscerally distasteful.

Many other programs teach about theoretical aspects of development—from ways of measuring of community well-being to analyzing how human livelihoods are supported by ecosystem services to engineering solutions for minor infrastructure works. Field Tools Bootcamp provides residence with experiential preparedness of the challenges they may encounter while working in the field.

Each year, an immeasurable number of individuals venture into remote locales to implement development initiatives. One person may be working in support of an agricultural extension project while another conducts ethnographic research about cultural forms of decision-making. Yet another person may be supporting a bi-lateral technical assistance, or leading a humanitarian relief effort in an impoverished country ravaged by natural disaster. Novice fieldworkers bring new ideas, tremendous capacity, and a wealth of theoretical training to the development community, yet even tenured practitioners lament moments in our career for which we were ill-prepared for the practical realities that we encountered.

The Field Tools Bootcamp helps to bridge this gap by simulating common challenges fieldwork. In rural New England, USA, we offer a setting that is comfortable and risk-free field environment to learn first-hand about how to adapt to a new and challenging cultural context in a semi-remote agricultural community, where residents learn by learn by doing and by making mistakes. We bring students face to face with a variety of difficult—yet practical—challenges in a controlled environment. Our expert facilitators monitor how each resident interacts with the challenges and help residents to reflect on lessons learned in order to cultivate lasting problem-solving skills.

Our mission is to help train the next generation of fieldworkers to be well prepared for the challenges of life in foreign and remote communities. Our residents arrive in the Berkshire County from all over the world. They arrive with a range of visions, training, and skills, and depart equipped with the practical knowledge of how to make a farm work, how to make oneself understood, and how to get things done. They leave ready to make a difference—prepared for the difficulties their work will necessarily entail.

Our Socio-Economic and Geographic Contexts

The Berkshire County of Western Massachusetts is a pioneering community among those committed to sustainable living in the US. A large portion of Berkshires economic production centers on agricultural production (small-scale farms) and the food service industry (markets, grocers, restaurants). The Berkshires have achieved national and international notoriety for some of the community-level sustainability initiatives involving the participation of local farmers, store owners, banks and other local businesses. The capacity, mode of thinking and the practices support it are by no means specific to our community, and exist in every part of the world.

Problems of sustainability, resource management, and resilience are universal, but impoverished communities face the most severe challenges—particularly among developing countries. Classroom study of development is invaluable, and it is only through sustained and thorough research that progress can be made on basic issues of the sustainability of human existence. But classroom work is not enough; without the pragmatic skills needed to get work done in challenging, unfamiliar, and sometimes extreme environments, the practice of sustainability will remain academic.

The Field Tools Bootcamp utilizes the Berkshire food economy as a resource and positive example for practical pre-field training for development fieldworkers. Students will draw on the experience and knowledge of local Berkshire farmers (and others) to learn practical, tested, sustainable ways to solve basic and universal development challenges. Residents will learn first-hand about the challenges farmers face in this rugged natural environment, characterized by small-sized pasture lands, fertile but rocky soils, rolling mountain hills, cliff-side river vallys. While most of the lands in the area were first cleared long-ago by early pioneers and have in active use under subsequent generations of farmer, there are also large area of less-disturbed lands that contain archaeological traces of past cultural groups.

Our Curriculum

The field.tools bootcamp curriculum has three main components:

1. Training in Rapid Adaptation to Different Cultural Contexts

Field Tools Bootcamp emphasizes the need for development practitioners to be able to rapidly adapt to new cultural environments. One way that we help to foster this capability is by offing a 'crash course' in the principles of rapid language acquisition. We engage special facilitators to conduct work-study lesson modules in a language that is foreign to each group of in-coming residents. Each resident is led by facilitators through a series of tasks and work chores to simulate an immersion environment. At the each of each day, students review theoretical approaches to rapid language acquisition and discuss their experiences from their work day.

2. A Safe Experiential Learning Environment

Field Tools Bootcamp schedules daily challenges to simulate problem settings that one may encounter when working in a developing country. Daily challenges are framed as 'sustainability interventions', each student is asked to contribute in 'implementing' the intervention. Both student performance and the meta-phenomenological contexts of the given sustainability objective, are reviewed in critical, self-reflective discussion seminars.

Our experienced staff and trainers watch as students make mistakes, and then ask students to critically evaluate what they did "wrong" or what they might have done differently to solve a problem in a more expedient or efficient manner. Field Tools Bootcamp engages residents in self-reflection and seminar-style critical dialogues about current development issues. Each person interprets and resolves a series of simulated challenges.

In the beginning, things will be tough. The setting and set-up at the camp is semi-rugged (and, at times, we actively try to make it more difficult for residents). Over the 15-day course, student will come to be highly appreciative of the overall experience--having solved a variety of daily problems and thought, shared, and learned about larger-scale problem of community and sustainable living.

3. Self-Reflective Sustainability Seminar Modules

Helping to re-enforce the lessons learned in the daily challenge sessions, Field Tools Bootcamp leads discussion seminars with students on topics of sustainability theory.

Our repertoire of sustainability theory modules includes:

• Water systems
• Agricultural Practices Globally
• Principles of Basic Sanitary Systems
• Principles of Basic Shelters
• Principles of Food Conservation

Residency

Residency at the bootcamp is rustic, and some of our hosting locales are rather primitive. We place our visiting resident students among community hosts based on an ad hoc system of EoIs and candidate profile matching.

Basic Accommodations

Our basic guarantees of residence occupation:

• Accommodations will be clean to regional and MA state law for short-term, over-night resident camps.
• Students will have access to private lock-boxes and the option of storing valuables in our company vault.

Local Amenities and Regional Benefits

field.tools bootcamp also avails of our environs to expose students to a variety of life skills for living outdoors. In the area are many natural sites for rock climbing and camping.

• walking / hiking
• rock climbing
• canoing / kayaking
• camping
• How to set up a tent?
• How to cook food outdoors.
• Practice in eating from the land.
• day trips