ABSTRACT
Field Parasitology is a course started at the suggestion of Brent Nickol, the founding director of the Cedar Point Biological Station. After the first year of operation, he asked if I would write and submit the proposal for such a course, designed specifically for the field program, and I did. The proposal was approved quickly, and Field Parasitology was subsequently offered in 1976, the second year of CPBS operation. Once I arrived at the station to actually teach the new course, however, it immediately became obvious that this endeavor had two overriding characteristics. First, it allowed me total freedom to choose from literally hundreds of examples-an abundant wealth of biological material-to illustrate principles of parasitism. Second, I had virtually no control whatsoever over any of this material. In other words, I couldn’t make something happen or appear on schedule, and I certainly couldn’t order it from the supply house; instead, I had to go find my organismsand their usefulness as teaching materials-in the surrounding landscape. What we’d discovered was a science course that had to be conducted according to pedagogical principles more akin to those of creative writing or beginning drawing courses than to science curricula. In other words, we had to extract lessons from our environment rather than build lessons from items in stock.
