In Fieldston School Course, All of New York's a Classroom On a drizzly Tuesday morning, Shiloh Shabazz, a wiry and excitable 71-year-old, was talking about sleeping on subways, on and under park benches, and generally about being an addict and a nomad. Crack was big. Base was big," he said of the time when he was using drugs. The shelters, he said, were rough. I don't know if any of you are aware of those. It was a fair question, considering his audience was 16- to 18-year-old students from the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. The private school, in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx, is not far from Honeywell Apartments, the low-income housing complex where Mr. Shabazz was speaking. But he may have sensed it was a long way away. If the students were not aware of shelters and affordable housing before the trip, they were getting a crash course now. That same morning, a Fieldston parent, Adam Weinstein, who happens to be chief executive of the nonprofit organization that developed Honeywell, led a discussion about the evolution of public housing from tenements to towers. The students had also visited Lambert Houses, another low-income complex, and would set off for Via Verde, a new subsidized, sustainable development. The trip was one of many making up Fieldston's City Semester, an experiential, project-based class that integrates history, English, ethics, languages and science. "The idea is to use place as a primary source," said Andrew Meyers, chairman of City Semester and one of the eight teachers leading the class. Students have explored the Bronx and beyond. Lena Cole, a junior who lives in Chelsea, said, "In the semester, I've seen more of New York than in my whole life." Experiential, or hands-on, learning is a buzzword in educational circles, the theory being that it helps students absorb information better and think more critically than they would in a classroom. "Aristotle said that which we learn, we only learn by doing," said Patrick F. Bassett, head of the National Association of Independent Schools. Schools somehow found themselves migrating away from that. A few years ago, a group of private schools founded the Independent Schools Experiential Education Network. Lakeside School in Seattle (Bill Gates's alma mater) and the Watershed School in Colorado are among a growing number that are expanding their curriculums around experiential and expeditionary learning. "They are getting great results," Mr. Bassett said, noting that at the Watershed School, scores on a test of critical thinking were exceptionally high. It's what colleges are looking for. City Semester evolved from other Fieldston courses, including one on the Bronx and another called "Inventing Gotham." But those were expensive, with the Bronx class including six teachers. Last year, Mr. Meyers and his colleagues secured a $10,000 grant from the venture grant board at Fieldston, which finances new initiatives. They used it to develop a class that all of them could teach. Students led walking tours through Harlem and the Lower East Side. They took sides defending or prosecuting the renowned urban planner Robert Moses in a weeklong trial about his role in the deterioration of the South Bronx. They went to Hunts Point in the Bronx at 4 a.m. to see the city's food supply arrive and to interview owners and workers, and a two-day scavenger hunt took them from Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. On another rainy Tuesday, the students paddled canoes down the Bronx River on the first part of a two-day trek. Traffic whizzed by as they approached the Cross Bronx Expressway, the Moses legacy that cleaved the South Bronx. Three students had never been in a canoe; others were experts from summer camp. Howard Waldman, (the "green dean"), who teaches science, called attention to the tweet of the yellow warbler, and students asked park workers on the banks of the river whether the Japanese knotgrass was hybrid or regular. The canoes gathered every 10 minutes so that groups could make presentations on topics like the creation of Shoelace Park, macroinvertebrates, and the birds and fish of the Bronx River. "Two million cubic yards of dirt was removed to create the park," Charlie Holtz, a junior from England, said. If you want to make a park, why remove the dirt? A conversation about the transformation of the Bronx followed. Soon after, a water fight ensued on the river. The class has created some scheduling conflicts. The students said that at least one math teacher was sick of their late returns from trips, and that a yoga class had to be created to satisfy a gym requirement. Next year, a biking component will be added to the course to satisfy that requirement. Some seniors complained that the class, an elective, had taken them away from their friends in their last semester. But students also said they preferred talking over listening to lectures, and completing projects over writing papers. "It's pushed me out of my comfort zone, socially and academically," Emma Bratman said. I've made a lot of friends I wouldn't have known. On the river, the mood turned less chipper. A canoe with lunch disappeared for an hour, and the rain began to get to some of the students. "I've never been this miserable," one girl said. "It's probably acid rain," another said. Mr. Meyers remained upbeat. By day's end, many were dripping and discouraged. Ms. Cole, the junior from Chelsea, said she would skip the second day of the canoe trip but for the fact that one of the stops was at the ABC Carpet and Home outlet, where her mother, the chief executive, was giving a presentation about the company's green roof. On the bus that would take them back to Fieldston, Ms. Bratman said the satirical magazine at the school had just posted a Twitter message: What's the worst thing you'd do to avoid city semester?